Golang – when programmers had smaller egos

https://www.wired.com/story/attention-spoiled-software-engineers-take-a-lesson-from-googles-programming-language/

by elephant_hi • 2 years ago

27 20 2 years ago

_cenw• 2 years ago

That's maybe a bit... thick. Fewer commercial ambitions?

The entire point of Go is to be the Java of Google, the language you don't need several weeks of training for to be productive in and start reading and writing code.

Java's problem is that it doesn't do this well for anything but heavy business logic applications, and the more clever the programmer, the more they can build up complex structures. Go counters this by not having complex structures and forcing you to consider every failure case (at least until writing "if err != nil" becomes second nature) while also having a better (but not perfect) API surface for writing the kinds of applications important at Google (network heavy, distributed systems, performance focused).

riku_iki4• 2 years ago

Java's problem is that it doesn't do this well for anything but heavy business logic applications, and the more clever the programmer, the more they can build up complex structures

Java has very simple OOP constructs (classes, interfaces, inheritance, simple generics) which everyone supposedly know already in industry. Golang from another hand implemented unorthodox solutions, which actually require some learning curve (e.g. how to model stuff without inheritance and generics).

Ferret7446• 2 years ago

Java encourages (partly through language design and partly through its community/ecosystem) [Enterprise Grade Programming](https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...). The problem isn't the language per se, but that most code bases will require you to earn an architecture astronaut certification for that particular code base.

But also, the Go spec is a couple of pages and the Java spec is, uh, it's taking a while to load for me... ah yes, 876 pages. How's that learning curve?

agarren2• 2 years ago

Relying on composition rather than inheritance often feels much more natural in my experience. C, Basic, Pascal, etc. are all missing inheritance and generics, are they similarly unorthodox and difficult?

Java-style OO has a place, but it’s not always a perfect fit. Java, C#, and arguably C++ have taken a kitchen-sink and grafted any and all constructs found in other languages so long as they look remotely useful. The result often is useful, but it also results in a more complex language.

While Go isn’t a perfect language, nor is it a great language, I /have/ found it to be a productive language in ways that Java, python, ruby, etc. are not. I attribute this productivity boost to the simplicity of the language (if not the runtime) and to the conservative approach taken to add new features.

chewz• 2 years ago

The entire point of Go is to be the Java of Google, the language you don't need several weeks of training for to be productive in and start reading and writing code.

The point of Golang is Google’s answer to rapidly declining quality of its search results. Golang is the first and only language where faced with problems I would rather read source code of library then frantically search for solutions in Google…

disintegrator• 2 years ago

I’ve always associated Go as something that swooped in on Python, Ruby and Node.js to offer an alternative that is much faster out of the gate and far more approachable as C/C++/Java. This continues to be true from my experience and I think Go succeeds at this even with some of its well documented rough edges.

erik_seaberg• 2 years ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41641324

bagful• 2 years ago

False humility is a form of egotism; every stated upside of Go can be equally construed as a paternalistic concession to our general failure to produce capable programmers, let alone at a sufficient volume to fulfill Google’s commercial ambitions that require the production of Lots Of Code.

bitsandboots• 2 years ago

Didn't expect to get insulted for not using golang despite it not having a compelling use case for my needs. But here we are.

xracy2• 2 years ago

Every golang programmer I've worked with doesn't fit the bill of "small ego".

theshrike79• 2 years ago

Have you met people who use Rust? They're the crossfitters of the programming profession :D

xracy2• 2 years ago

I don't know crossfitters, but everyone I know who uses rust loves to talk about Rust.

That's a different thing from the ego of gophers. Gophers believe they are superior at programming conventions because they know Go. They have a real "holier than thou" concept. In reality, modern programming languages are fine, and not that interestingly unique...

nathants2• 2 years ago

there’s two types of programmers:

- those who’ve worked with go fulltime for a few months

- those who haven’t

looking back at the go i wrote in my first weeks after dropping python, it is very different from the code i write now.

go is imperfect, but fantastic. hard to hold any other view without being in the latter category.

arunix• 2 years ago

Can you say more about how your code changed?

nathants2• 2 years ago

i used to write code like this[1]. now i write code like this[2].

mostly what changed is the way i read code. if err != nil is a friend now, not the abomination i first thought it was.

1. https://github.com/nathants/s4/blob/15eb67158cdc03ee1983d060...

2. https://github.com/nathants/libaws/blob/affb1d6002250e35c5ba...

Golang – when programmers had smaller egos

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