Twelve Years of Go

Re:Twelve Years of Go by throwaway894345 on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @02:51PM (#29179681)

Agreed. It still surprises me that so many other languages fail at the fundamentals (minimal learning curve, static binaries, fast builds, reproducible dependency management, great tooling, great stdlib + ecosystem, etc) and yet many devotees of those languages have positively hyperventilated about Go's error handling and type system for 12 years. Go is finally getting generics and I'm sort of cautiously excited about it (like I was when Apple added the TouchBar to MacBook Pros), but any net benefit is going to be positively negligible in comparison to the degree in which Go raised the bar on the fundamentals.

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Re:Twelve Years of Go by kaba0 on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @04:23PM (#29181031)

I’m not arguing that there are languages where the state of tooling is bad to say the least, but how did Go raise the bar compared to something like Java or C#, the actual “blue-collar” languages?

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Re:Twelve Years of Go by throwaway894345 on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @04:46PM (#29181361)

There's a lot to like about Java and C#, but here are a few things that Go improved upon that spring to mind. Note that in some cases, Java and C# may have caught up in the interim. Note also that some things (e.g., low-latency GC) understandably weren't available from day 0 in Go, but followed quickly:

* Static binaries by default

* Single, straightforward build system (no DSLs)

* Single, ubiquitous code formatter

* Minimal learning curve

* Zero-work package publishing

* Zero-work documentation generation and publication

* Testing framework out of the box

* Production-grade HTTP server out of the box

* Low latency GC out of the box

More generally, C# and Java have always seemed to have a philosophy of "make everything as abstract and configurable as possible, and make the user understand every configuration option in order to do anything (overwhelm the user with configuration)". Granted, I haven't used C# or Java seriously since Go was open sourced, so it's possible that these are among the things that improved in C# and Java following Go's release.

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Re:Twelve Years of Go by sangnoir on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @07:39PM (#29182995)

> how did Go raise the bar compared to something like Java or C#, the actual “blue-collar” languages?

For me, Go being combination of being well-thought-out, opinionated and batteries included took away the futile fanboi flamewars/bike-shedding: JBoss or WebSphere? Tabs or spaces? Struts or Spring?

For these reasons and more, Go is offers a more pleasant experience when working in a team. When reading code other's wrote,I encounter fewer surprises in the logic and project structure. Go codebases are easier to grok, IMO.

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