Re:Rob Pike interview
by eropple on Thursday April 30, 2020 @11:57AM
(#23032267)
I would entreat you to not be afraid of Golang. To be frank its adoption speaks to a desire to make software that does not require (or, often, benefit from "staff SWE" skills). Treat it as what it is, a jumped-up, terser, and in some ways gutted Java, and give it another go. It is designed, to a fault--and this is a little pejorative, I absolutely do not enjoy writing Golang because of it--to be not that hard.
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This is my impression too. I was at Google when Golang v1 was released, and my friends and I were hobbyist language geeks and decided to play around with it.
We were....not fans. We were already in the habit of writing extremely clean and healthy code[1], and having a language hand-holding and hectoring us into doing things in its narrow, specific way was just too much of a hit to productivity. Now that I work in a C++ codebase full of very smart domain experts but light on engineering expertise, I can appreciate Go's value in certain circumstances, but if you're lucky enough to work with a talented and experienced engineering team, Go is a pain in the ass for anything but beginners.
[1] A habit I'm paradoxically trying to unlearn a little at my newer company, due to being on a different point on the short-term velocity/long-term health spectrum
This is largely where I'm at. I've never gotten paid to write C++, though I've written my share, and I went through Scala, Ruby, Kotlin, a little Elixir and a little Rust, and now almost exclusively TypeScript--and I just don't need what Golang wants to make me do to do a good job and to output high-quality code.
golang is not terser than Java for any non-trivial code bases, it's quite the opposite.
Go is what Java 1.0 could have been, however we are already on Java 14.
I usually note that it matches up pretty favorably with Java 1.4, and now there are some ten-percent jokes to be made...
I see what you did there. :)