> dreadful language to try to do concurrency in due to its global interpreter lock

don't take it too seriously. GIL has its issues and it would be nice to see it gone but "dreadful" is an overstatement. Python wouldn't be so widely used as a back-end language otherwise. Concurrency is not parallelism.

On "it [Go] will become a model for how concurrency is managed in future languages." -- it is not as clear cut as it appears at the first glance: "Notes on structured concurrency, or: Go statement considered harmful" https://vorpus.org/blog/notes-on-structured-concurrency-or-g...

Dreadful may be a little strong but anytime I've tried to implement something like asyncio for a non trivial piece of code it becomes pretty obtuse. (imo)

I’ve found asyncio to be a very simple model to understand, using the aio libs: aiohttp, aiopg, aiobotocore, etc.

Basically just slap “async” or “await” in front of everything and understand that anytime there is a network connection being accessed, that method will release control of the main thread.

You just have to pay attention to where something might block the thread for any significant amount of time - heavy calculation or lengthy file IO

You can spawn a multitiude of async tasks on startup and have super basic “scheduling” by using asyncio.sleep with some jitter.

The only time I have seen the performance limits of a naive asyncio app reached was in an auth app that sat in front of every API request for the whole company, and even then it was an obscure DB connection pool management issue deep in psycopg2.

goroutines (and the go keyword) are the primitive, just like async is the primitive for python. Something like golang.org/x/sync/errgroup gives Go the same kind of "nursery" concept and can be leveraged almost identically (modulo Go not having the "with" concept, but defer can play the same role)

there is no doubt that a "nursery"-like construction can be implemented in Go in the same way like any language with "goto" can implement structured loops. The point is in constraining what can be done.

There is a trade off: "goto" is powerful but it is likely to lead to a spaghetti code. "nursery" introduces constrains but makes it easier to deal with error handling/cleanup, back pressure issues such as https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2020/1/1/async-pressure/

> Go community’s practice for grounding language enhancement requests not in it-would-be-nice-to-have abstractions but rather in a description of real-world problems.

jfc, the arrogance of this asshole. Seems like a decent fit for Go though, considering that language’s history of ignoring PL research..

I mean, Go is awesome for containers, and it’s awesome if you have a lot of junior devs and a decent amount of churn.

But the amount of anti-intellectualism by big shots in the community is seriously depressing.

ESR might be a lot of things, but he’s not a junior dev by any standard. And experience reports are pretty consistent across the experience gradient—Go is useful for solving real world problems, and often the very abstract languages fail to do so (often especially those languages beloved by intellectuals). You can challenge the qualifications of the reporters with respect to their own experiences if you like, but that seems like a silly thing to do.

If PLT can’t produce languages that practitioners find useful, then PLT is at fault, not practitioners.

EDIT: Rereading my last paragraph, "PLT is at fault" sounds harsher than I intended it to. Mostly it just sounds like PLT is based on a model of software development practice that doesn't fit well with the real world. The model performs poorly, but PLT supporters like the parent commenter are (implicitly or explicitly) blaming contemporary software development practice for the mismatch.

> often especially those languages beloved by intellectuals

*self-proclaimed intellectuals

To be fair, it also took me years to realize how programming as tought in academia is out of touch with reality.

I never said esr was a junior dev, and he’s obviously not :)

>“Go is useful for solving real world problems”

People repeat this like a mantra (you also hear similar from rich hickey’s most fervent acolytes in the clojure community), and I can’t for the world understand what it means...

I mean fucking BASIC can solve real world problems... I’ve spent ten years writing java and php to great success, but I'm still happy to never write in those languages again.

I even adore Elm, despite its annoying lack of type classes, but I respect Evan’s goal of avoiding complexity in the language. That argument holds up a lot better than That Rob Pike’s argument on types:

“ Early in the rollout of Go I was told by someone that he could not imagine working in a language without generic types. As I have reported elsewhere, I found that an odd remark.

To be fair he was probably saying in his own way that he really liked what the STL does for him in C++. For the purpose of argument, though, let's take his claim at face value.

What it says is that he finds writing containers like lists of ints and maps of strings an unbearable burden. I find that an odd claim. I spend very little of my programming time struggling with those issues, even in languages without generic types.

But more important, what it says is that types are the way to lift that burden. Types. Not polymorphic functions or language primitives or helpers of other kinds, but types.

That's the detail that sticks with me.

Programmers who come to Go from C++ and Java miss the idea of programming with types, particularly inheritance and subclassing and all that. Perhaps I'm a philistine about types but I've never found that model particularly expressive.

My late friend Alain Fournier once told me that he considered the lowest form of academic work to be taxonomy. And you know what? Type hierarchies are just taxonomy. You need to decide what piece goes in what box, every type's parent, whether A inherits from B or B from A. Is a sortable array an array that sorts or a sorter represented by an array? If you believe that types address all design issues you must make that decision.

I believe that's a preposterous way to think about programming. What matters isn't the ancestor relations between things but what they can do for you.”

It’s just your average, obvious complaint about the inflexibility of class hierarchies in OOP, with a slight misdirection at the beginning when he mentions generic types (aka parametric polymorphism) but for some reason that’s an argument against types?! He mentions polymorphic functions, as if they can’t be typed???

I mean I made the same mistake after three semesters of java at uni, but one semester of c/c++/python made me realize there was more to programming and I eventually discovered type theory, which makes Rob Pike’s claims seem odd at best.

For me personally (and thus anecdotally) PLT has been a boon in most aspects, even though I have to deal with imperative or object-oriented languages from time to time. it’s just such a drag...

> I can’t for the world understand what it means...

It means Go performs well on real world projects. People feel productive, the language, tooling, and ecosystem get out of the way. You (and most PLT advocates I've encountered) seem to be evaluating languages on their inputs/features (presumably because you believe axiomatically that certain features--e.g., type systems--have a huge effect on the success or failure of a given software project) while the "useful for real world problems" view is about evaluating languages on their outputs. The latter view is harder to measure objectively, but it accounts for everything (e.g., syntax, type system, tooling, performance, ecosystem, etc) in correct proportion (no axiomatic beliefs).

Many PLT proponents generally seem to struggle with the notion that languages are successful when their model predicts that they shouldn't be. For example, many PLT proponents believe type systems strongly predict the success of a language, yet languages with very sophisticated type systems which are much admired by PLT proponents do poorly in the real world and languages with very flat-footed type systems (e.g., Go) do relatively well.

Either the qualitative data about these languages are wrong (e.g., contrary to the qualitative data, Haskell actually makes for more productive software development on balance than Go), or these PLT proponents' whitebox model is wrong. My money is on the qualitative data.

> You (and most PLT advocates I've encountered) seem to be evaluating languages on their inputs/features (presumably because you believe axiomatically that certain features--e.g., type systems--have a huge effect on the success or failure of a given software project) while the "useful for real world problems" view is about evaluating languages on their outputs.

I don’t, so please keep you assumptions to yourself and don’t put words to in my mouth.

> in correct proportion (no axiomatic beliefs).

What is this based on?

> I don’t, so please keep you assumptions to yourself and don’t put words to in my mouth.

I'm hardly putting words in your mouth. You were expressing more-or-less exactly this sentiment in your previous post.

> What is this based on?

It follows by definition of output-based or blackbox evaluation. Evaluating the output of a system implies that you are evaluating inputs in proportion to their contribution to the output.

> I'm hardly putting words in your mouth. You were expressing more-or-less exactly this sentiment in your previous post.

Trust me, I wasn’t.

> It follows by definition of output-based or blackbox evaluation. Evaluating the output of a system implies that you are evaluating inputs in proportion to their contribution to the output.

I like this! It’s like pure functions/total programming, only not rigorously defined in the slightest.

It’s not an answer to my question though, HOW do you know that the results of your output/blackbox testing is correct?