The article mentions the impressive worst case pause times of Go's GC. Since then we have performed some additional benchmarking. The conclusion was: it is impressive, but there are still a couple of issues that break the sub 1ms claims. We blogged about this here: https://making.pusher.com/golangs-real-time-gc-in-theory-and.... It's hard to guarantee low latency in all cases...

Michael also mentions that there is nothing like ThreadScope, or at least nothing that's easy to find. The latter is true. There is an impressive runtime system event visualiser which can be opened with `go tool trace` https://golang.org/cmd/trace/. You can see a screenshot of this in the GC blog post I linked to above. Unfortunately the only documentation is this Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FP5apqzBgr7ahCCgFO-yoVhk... which is tricky to find, and could be more in-depth.

I'm in the middle of writing a blog post on how to use this too. Watch out for it on our engineering blog in the next month or two. https://making.pusher.com/

In fact, this has been the basis for much writing on Lisp too. Paul Graham has written entire essays along the same lines.

If you work in a job that forces the use of a less powerful language than what you've been exposed to, you can, I think, go through a sort of depression. You simply long to use the tools that you know hold much more power yet must resign yourself to the tools you have.

You can overcome the problem by being present in your work. The language might be ugly. It might be totally underpowered with limited means of abstraction and a type system that snmacks you and, sometimes, your client over the head. What you can do is, despite that, commit to writing great software with the tools you have. Commit to improving your work. Perhaps expand the ecosystem with tools borne of insights from your adventures with high-powered tools.

You will have a much more enjoyable time in most languages this way. Perhaps except MUMPS but there might be hope.

I ask as an old SML guy, I like the math theory, I like the promise of better, more accurate and reliable software, I think you can do some beautiful things with algebraic types but I've been dumbfounded by the lack of great examples out there. Ada suffered/suffers the same fate, it has this "academic" pedigree for robustness but not many examples that you can get your hands on. so much expressiveness that doesn't seem to result in much expression.

I'm tempted to compare it to PHP, which exploded in popularity despite (unarguably, IMHO) better languages existing all around it at the time. Go doesn't seem like a bad language in the way that PHP was a bad language for its first 4~5 major versions, but it does find itself surrounded by many more powerful/expressive languages, and is seemingly getting much faster adoption.

I've been learning Go myself, and while I miss some of the features of my normal primary languages (Perl, lately, but also Ruby and Python), I like that I can read other people's Go code without having to look anything up, even though Go is very new to me and I have years experience reading/writing Perl/Ruby/Python. Of course, Perl/Python/Ruby aren't a major paradigm shift away from Go as Haskell is...but, it's still a question of whether it's better to write ten simplistic LOC or two maybe opaque LOC. I tend to prefer concision over verbosity (and thus hate reading Java; I get lost in the trees before I can find the forest).

Maybe Go is a sweet spot for a lot of developers. Rob Pike did a talk called Simplicity is Complicated, about this very subject...I found it a pretty convincing argument. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFejpH_tAHM

1) Our industry is obsessed with new and shiny.

2) There are a lot of developers and companies who don't have the time to invest in a new paradigm or language.

3) By learning/using golang these developers and companies can look "hip" and forward thinking with minimal effort.

With a Java background and a 10 hour investment in golang you can write decent software.

With a 10 hour investment in Haskell you can't do anything.

While you might think it's worth spending 100+ hours learning Haskell, I don't (at the moment) have any reason to Haskell as a better time investment than anything else on that list.. why should I give it more than 10 hours?

So while I'd love to write big chunks of Haskell, if its just me doing it, that code will be nuked and rewritten unless I also undertake a project of education. So accessibility is key. Go/python/js seem to win in that regard, and likewise in access to libraries.

So unless as an organisation there is motivation to step up skilling, e.g. because there is a lot of money at stake if something breaks (e.g. trading software), or because there is a community of practice (compilers) its hard to see Haskell gaining much ground.

Likewise all those other languages has their niche, and it is hard to seem them displacing each other.

This happens in hiring practices, in programming languages, in infrastructure tech, in data tech, etc.

It's extremely rare to encounter a data scale problem that actually requires a Hadoop-ish deployment, but they're all over the place. It's extremely rare to encounter an ops infrastructure that requires a scale and complexity where Kubernetes-ish tools make sense, but they're all over the place.

I admittedly don't fully understand the point of Go (as in existentially). I have used it, and will assuredly have to keep using it based on its increasing popularity. But it's not as good as Erlang for reliability or supporting production tools (services use cases). It's not as good as Rust or Haskell for implementation assurance (safety/security use cases). It's not as good for numerical processing as Julia or Fortran (scientific/performance use cases).

It feels a lot like the next generation of Java to me.

In that it's some shape of "good enough". And when "good enough" is combined with the cachet of aligning oneself with Google's ecosystem, it's basically unstoppable.

It's a pretty close to pure expression of a few language designer's vision, with very little in the way of corporate influence (that I can discern). And, I think that's the point of Go; it's the language its designers wanted for the tasks they wanted to work on (web scale services). It just happens that a lot of people want/need to work on the same sort of thing.

I agree that most people embracing massive scale are doing so way too early and probably aint gonna need it. But, that doesn't mean Go isn't a useful tool, anyway. I've watched a few videos, and read a few tutorials, and the brevity of Go for things like network servers is breathtaking. The cleverness of interfaces is...well, it really has to be seen to be understood. It's not OO, it's not functional. It's...something else. Contrary to the impression that maybe I've given in other comments, Go does have some features that aren't commonly seen elsewhere (or, if they are, they're bolted on). It has some fancy features, but only a few, and only in specific areas.

It seems like a very well thought out language, to me. Which might have been true of Java in its very early days...I'm not sure. I've never really been a Java developer, though I've read some Java code now and then.

So, Go might be merely "good enough" on some fronts, but I think it's great on a few specific fronts. And, it does it without requiring total buy-in on a new paradigm, which is probably its killer feature. It looks a little like Python or whatever in syntax, but acts a little like Erlang on a few specific details. Pretty good combination, and the community seems to agree.

[0] https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponenti...

Well, Google doesn't put as much money into Go either (as MS and Sun put into Java and C#). Sun and C# had much bigger teams, much bigger budgets, and tons of marketing money spent on them, including actual ads everywhere. Just the team writing the C# documentation was probably bigger than the whole Google Go team.

But that's relative:

Unlike most OSS/community driven languages (e.g. Nim or Julia), Go has a big enough team that's paid to work on Go. That makes a difference.

Also found it crashed a lot, which I would have hoped would be one of the things Haskell would solve (the problems revolved it having to integrate into C code for linking to X, but that's part of living in the real world).

You can create your own document templates, and tweak the resulting output in a million ways. At my job, I have to create a lot of documentation, often in PDF or docx, and Pandoc has become an integral part of my workflow. I can create documents within the comfortable environment of Emacs, and use Pandoc to produce output in any old format that $pointy_haired_boss may desire.

Complex transformations of data structures are part of the compilation activity too, but they're more difficult to spot in the wild of applications.

I think the number of useful tools is pretty closely correlated to popularity, and obviously Haskell has a relatively small user base. It's not like Haskell gives you super-powers and makes you 10x more productive; it mostly lets you write better software, not necessarily more software. I do feel more productive with Haskell, but it's on the order of 50-100% (depending on the task), not enough to let Haskellers match the open-source output of a very popular language like C.

Oh, and i've seen someone on HN saying it's used in something like the upcoming Kosovo land property tax system or something like that but i am not directly aware of that.

On the practical side, I love having types that let me refactor so mercilessly, along with a very mature compiler with a decent suite of warnings.

Perhaps the type of problems Haskell is apt to solve (those requiring strict correctness, etc.) are not typically open source software projects.

Rust, I'd argue, is the correct choice for many OSS projects. In fact, for security-focused projects, it should be the only choice. C-like performance without C-like vulnerabilities? It makes no sense to choose C or C++ any more.

The great thing about Haskell and other functional programming languages is that the functional style forces the program to be created in a form that is modular and elegant. Programs become modular and composable and re-composable in the functional world because the programmer has No Choice but to build his programs in an elegant way. It's hard to explain this to a typical programmer who hasn't dived deep into functional programming but code reuse, modularity and elegance are significantly higher in functional programming languages than in procedural.

This elegance, beauty and forced organization comes at a high cost though. And the cost is thinking in a way that is outside the normal paradigm of what humans are use to. I know a lot of haskellers think that humans can be taught to think in both ways equally, I disagree with them and believe that it is far Easier for a human to think about an algorithm procedurally than it is for him to think about it functionally.

If you have several tasks to execute, what is your first thought on how to plan out those tasks? A task list (aka list of functions) or a series of composed tasks placed in a single sentence (aka expression)? The answer is obvious: humans think about the list first because procedural programming comes more naturally.

This I believe is the main reason why Haskell or lisps haven't taken over the programming world. Functional programming is just HARDER. It takes me 10 times longer to hack out a simple program in haskell than it does in python because haskell doesn't allow you to 'hack' together a program. In haskell the application has to be an elegant diamond or the thing won't even compile! Python allows me to hack something together quickly which is both a good and a bad thing because as we all know hacking together software is quick but easily leads to unmaintainable software.

Nonsense - You only have to make things as hard/elegant as you want them to be (and fore sure, some people do play that game for better/worse).

But, Haskell will happily allow you throw everything in to IO; you can side-step creating a perfect model and just hack together a list of imperative IO statements.

(unless you're referring to the difference between a dynlang and a static lang; that's a difference of another category altogether)

It's actually super pleasant!

It's even possible to opt out of static type checking if you want.

GHCi also provides a REPL that makes exploratory programming easy.

However, neither should prevent the other. (i.e. "you can do X" should not be confused with "always do X"). Haskell allows you to choose.

Indeed, proper domain modeling is preferred.. but it's nice to have to ability to make that choice yourself based on your own constraints.

Additionally, Haskell makes it very easy/pleasant to refactor from the former to the latter. (On that note, imho the best models (in business) are arrived at iteratively rather than big-design-up-front)

That is not what is usually meant by "expressiveness" of a language. You seem to be talking about types of languages (as in the Chomsky hierarchy), by implying that there are problems you can solve in assembler but not in Haskell. That is not the case, as both are Turing-complete (Type-0).

In contrast, "expressiveness" usually refers to the "ease" (one may substitute conciseness in most cases) with which higher level concepts (abstractions) are expressible in the language, and here Haskell clearly wins against assembler, and many other popular languages.

No it's not. The Haskell compiler is free to use whatever assembly instructions that it sees fit to compile the Haskell program.

Maybe you mean that effectively, the set of assembly programs (i.e. sequences of assembly instructions) which existing Haskell compilers happen to produce is limited. This is true. But it is also true that you can find an equivalent Haskell program for every possible assembly program, where equivalent means they exhibit the same behavior with respect to inputs and outputs. This is because both are Turing equivalent.

Now, it's also true that the way two equivalent programs get to their results may differ. For example, the assembly program might be faster. However, these are non-functional properties of the programs. And you were talking explicitly about functionality, so this point doesn't count towards your argument.

But this is the basic idea I was trying to convey: that you lose "expressiveness" as you get higher and higher in levels of abstraction.

```asm section .data str: db 'Hello world!', 0Ah str_len: equ $ - str

section .text global _start

_start: mov eax, 4 mov ebx, 1 mov ecx, str mov edx, str_len int 80h mov eax, 1 mov ebx, 0 int 80h ```

In Haskell I don't have to consider any processor.

```hs main = putStr "Hello World" ```

expressiveness is about how much code you need for a certain behavior. It's not about how many (possible fucked up) source files my compiler accepts.

A typical task list has tons of side effects, which is not the case with your "pipe lines."

> If you have several tasks to execute, what is your first thought on how to plan out those tasks? A task list (aka list of functions) or a series of composed tasks placed in a single sentence (aka expression)? The answer is obvious: humans think about the list first because procedural programming comes more naturally. This I believe is the main reason why Haskell or lisps haven't taken over the programming world.

As to whether programming with expressions is fundamentally harder, I'm not so sure. Since Fortran, most languages have supported arithmetic expressions over primitive numeric types, since they are certainly not easier with an imperative approach (MOV, MOV, ADD, PUSH). Haskell allows one to easily take this further using arbitrary objects and algebras, for example, expressions with drawing primitives, parsing grammars, financial contracts etc. With a small amount of syntactic sugar, you can even make expressions that look exactly like imperative programming (Haskell's do notation).

There is nothing preventing using these "task lists" (e.g. lists/steps/procedures) in Haskell. In fact, "do notation", a core language feature every beginner learns, features it.

Functional programming in essence does not allow procedures, but with special incredibly complex abstractions you can simulate procedures. If you program using said abstractions I would argue that it makes functional programming even Harder to understand.

I still don't understand what the problem is with them.

It's just a box with some "stuff" in, a function that makes a new box with a thing inside, and a function that takes a box and a value and gives you a new box with some different stuff inside.

The hardest part for me was accepting that I can't look inside the box and don't actually need to.

I do get that there are a lot of people who'll look at monads and want to know why the heck they should bother when any "decent" or "reasonable" language just lets all their functions crap all over the filesystem whenever they like.

But I don't think do notation is what trips up beginners (not sure if this discussion is about beginners per se). It is explained by simple mechanical plug-and-chug transformations that I think beginners understand, but am willing to hear if there is evidence otherwise.. I just think it's the other things that will eventually trip them up (I was only responding to specific claims made earlier). Also, on the point of resting on abstractions being a problem, I don't find compelling, because I'm also sure that Python beginners don't understand what "class MyStuff(object):" is really doing, but if the abstraction isn't leaky try don't need to know right away, and they can delve later.

https://wiki.haskell.org/Research_papers/Functional_pearls

I've found that "powerful" languages allow me to do clever things(TM) and I hate clever things(TM) retroactively when I come back to them.

This gets even worse when you have multiple people on the team doing clever things(TM).

They also allow you to do sensible things(TM) like use the one and single, battle tested, standard library's generic sort, btree, etc implementation, instead of having to roll (and then read) 1000s of your own over the span of a year...

And it's a false dichotomy that you can't have the sensible things(TM) without the too-clever-for-their-own-good-things (TM) you allude too.

When you look at a line of code, what can you tell about its semantics without considering non-local information? What is invariant and what could potentially be redefined?

I think the answer to this question is extremely important for readability when you're not already familiar with a codebase.

There's functional alternatives to Haskell which adopt the non-lazy as default, such as Elm, Rust, SML, Lisps, Fantom, Elixir, Scala, etc.

I have to admit though, this is a bit of a trade off situation. Working with pure functions is very simple, but to map those to unpure behavior, like IO, you need something that isolate that, and without laziness, I'm not sure how you can get that to be practical.

I totally agree with you about pure functions. They can be a real simplification, but only if any deviation from purity requires special syntax at the call site. Otherwise you're back in the guessing game.

Haskell makes it easy to write data and function types that enforce purity at the call site, throwing a type error if you make a mistake. Not just purity though, you can restrict these types to any arbitrary set of methods of your choosing. This lets you do things like parsing a blob of JSON and having all functions that depend on the result be guaranteed not to have to deal with a failed parse or otherwise invalid data. The fact that the data is good has been encoded in the types, preventing you from passing bad data by throwing a type error.

Definitely Haskell's game then

It's just toy first-timer Haskell examples of quicksort (that still work, mind you) that don't.

But then again, take a language like C, and consider how many things (like proper error handling) are missing from 99% of the toy tutorial examples available.

“The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.”

~ Edsger Dijkstra

I think i can honestly say i did not fully get that quote until i learned Haskell

A language like Haskell lets me write extremely complicated code, but it also lets me concisely express the constraints I want in the form of types without getting too verbose. Go lets me do neither.

Less powerful languages force the programmer to come up with their own clever abstractions so that if you have multiple programmers you'll end up with 20 different clever ways of doing the same thing.

Dynamic languages - ruby, python, bash, objective C etc - allow all sorts of cleverness - such as monkey patching, attribute injection, dynamic lookup - because of their dynamic runtime. All the checks about whether the code makes sense is performed at runtime.

Languages with more mature/strong/static typesystems are initially restrictive - but the emphasis in cleverness is to be able to know upfront - and at compile time - if the code expressed is consistent in the way data and effects are represented and expressed.

Of course - there are other kinds of code complexity -in terms of ease of understanding, and maintainability - that will always involve tradeoffs considering the task at hand and nature of the programming environment (solo, community, commercial, academic etc).

I was forced to use go for a job, it actually made me feel stupider, so much that I didn't know how to use the right types anymore when i moved back to a more sophisticated language. I was afraid the language wouldn't let me do what I want, just like Go.

There will be a "go programmer generation" and it's not going to be pretty. If people deem "generics too complicated to understand", what can you expect from programmers who don't want to learn anything? The only thing I find nice about the language is implicit interfaces. But not at all cost.

Yes, you are a little bit limmited sometimes because of the lack of generics and the like, but at the same time, if you learn to use Go interfaces well, you end up using them most of the time happily. The parallelism primitives are great too.

As much as I love complex type systems, pattern matching, algebraic data types etc., I know that if Go had those things, it wouldn't be the language I love to write everyday anymore.

Somehow, Go is a really practical language and you end up being very productive in it, at least from my experience.

Saying that people who write Go should be stupid is shallow thinking. Complex languages aren't the only complexity that you should have. Some people concentrate on sophisticated architectural design (like Kubernetes).

There is one thing in Go, that I haven't met anywhere else. I can really understand any codebase I stumble upon in a matter of seconds. This is a huge boon to productivity.

Anyways, I never had any problems switching between Go and languages like F# or Scala on a daily basis. Rust looks interesting, though I think it will end up being too complex for a lot of people to understand, which will hinder its growth.

Care to elaborate a bit more?

I understand that when you see for(...) { b[i] = f(a[i]); } then you instinctively know that it's a loop that maps over some sequence, and so on. But let's say you have a 50-100kloc codebase with a 100 files in it. In what unique to Go way does Go help you understand the big picture/coarse architecture of such a project?

I meant smaller parts of code, and not for loops actually. (I prefer maps, filters etc.). Things like gofmt and the simplicity (in that, small number of concepts) of the language lead to most people writing fairly idiomatic code. This way most codebases look the same and you read each other's code as it were yours.

I genuinely despise that about it.

I think it's in the same position Java found itself in the early 2000s, another boring and unimaginative language that ended up being a workhorse.

But they could still build a better bridge, in less time, with proper materials.

I’d be interested if you can name any fields where non-Google go projects dominate. I only know of containers.

EDIT: You can also check out all the stuff the CoreOS team puts out.

We never even heard of any of those except for CockroachDB.

Are you sure these are "dominating the entire industry"-products, as you mentioned before? Or is it more that they’re only used in SV?

EDIT: Cockroach is actually the most SV'ish of all those.

I wouldn’t call Consul "industry-dominating technology", as you’d do with ElasticSearch, Hadoop, Spark, etc.

Almost everywhere else, it’s not "industry-dominating" at all, so I’m not sure why people use the argument "go is used everywhere and everything is in go" (which is obviously false) to argue that go is a good language.

(besides, C is actually used everywhere, but no one would use that as argument to show how C is a good language).

So standard that it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page? Nor is there even one for this specific type of datacenter-oriented service discovery?

This is all pretty niche tech, used by a handful of startups that engineer technology for billions of users, but not used anywhere else. I’ve never seen any companies on national scale operate with this – nor would they need to.

Anyways, Service Discovery like this is less niche than containers are. If containers are still niche for you, then there you go.

Well, so are you, your comments are even so grey I can barely read them anymore (and I can’t downvote you).

Regarding the rest: Containers are far less niche than Consul is. For service discovery, the market isn’t nearly as monopolized as containers are. And containers are far more used than consul is – most places I’ve seen build their own service discovery systems, or hardcode a main node and then have services in containers register with that, etc.

While for containers, at the moment, there’s almost only docker, due to the ecosystem.

Go's main attraction there is that it's a simple, script-like language that compiles to easily deployed static binaries. That enables people who's main job is not necessarily coding, but with a good scripting background to solve problems by writing more complex/performance-critical stuff which was previously not feasible in languages like Python, Ruby, ...

These projects requiring more performance would have required a seasoned dedicated C/C++ coder before, but now they can be started and maintainer by people initially not focusing on programming, but on solving problems they are facing in their daily job. They don't have the time to invest learning a language with complex typesystems where initially, you'll be fighting the language itself more than solving actual problems. For programmers, this investment is useful, it's their main skill and is worth something. Ops people have other things to worry about, and just want to solve problems.

It does mean wheels are being reinvented, but the major projects now have pretty smart people working on them, hitting the limits of the language and it's garbage collector, pushing them forward.

Thankfully, this is true only in the HN bubble. One example: Amazon.

That said if I look back on the past 6 months, I believe I have improved. In fact, a core principle I hold dear goes as follows:

"If I look back 6 months and I'm not any better, there's a big problem".

At one point, it seemed to annoy my non-technical boss because he couldn't understand why some of the code I wrote 6 months ago is perhaps not as good as it could be. He has kept me around so maybe it isn't a bad thing :)

We will, I think, always have programmers who don't want to learn anything new. It's interesting that there exists "Continuing Professional Development points" in the UK for healthcare: you get a rebate for each hour spent on courses to further your education. Maybe software engineering would benefit from this given the amount of, quite significant, cost sunk into large scale projects. Their universal credit programme should be incentive enough.

Entirely different problem though. If not Go, then what?

So I end up stuck working with crappier tech, crappier tools, and dealing with the effects of fewer and fewer resources going into improving the last 5% of annoying things about Erlang. While a deluge of resources go into partially reinventing the first 50% of it over and over again in some other random language.

Erlang would have been a great fit for Pusher's problem space.

Blargh! :-(

Agents don't seem like they should be in the standard library. The pipe operator should probably have some sugar for representing the first implicit argument to the function because it's weird to have things like Enum.map/2 become written as Enum.map/1 in that context. Protocols are bizarrely complex (you can do the same thing in Erlang with about 10% of the ceremony) and made weirder by the fact that structs are represented as maps with a special key instead of as records, so field access and key walking has an unnecessary amount of overhead comparatively. It doesn't feel "complete", because there are pretty big chunks of the underlying system that still make you extremely aware you're really running atop Erlang (debugging, tracing, profiling, etc.), up to and including the docs themselves which often just point you straight to the relevant Erlang documentation.

I like that it has brought a lot of new energy to the BEAM ecosystem. I like the tooling and focus on docs and testing that have come with it. I like the macro system, even though I think it's overused by the community and often to ill effect, but the system itself is much cleaner than Erlang's.

tl;dr... Sure, why not. :-)

Only you can easily change languages...

Stoicism was referring to actual things one cannot change. Like, say, death, or their status as a roman slave.

So it's less stoicism and more "our way or the highway".

That's a ridiculous blanket statement to make. Changing languages can incur a very high cost. Making peace with this as an individual seems like a useful skill to acquire. If you want to insist then there's no connection to stoicism, then fine, but don't try to pass off language choice as something that's easy to change along the way.

Yes, but you can always not even get started with Go (or whatever language you don't like) to begin with, so no change cost there.

Also, you can always change organizations, especially in today's "buyer's market" IT landscape. Better than working with something that you feel makes you miserable and non-productive.

And it's best to apply the principle of charity to what one responds to. Things are not always meant at their strictest interpretation. Compared to the "things you cannot change" stoicism was concerned with (like death, your past, some genetic misfortune, etc.), a programming language is nothing especially unchangeable -- which was my point.

That said, I absolutely love your libs and programs and use them all the time :-)

I don't write Rust or Go code but his repo seems like it is a great showcase for both languages - from what I read, it seems Rust is a little bit more expressive than Go but, having not written anything significant in either, I'm not the best judge.

I think Rust especially should be on on my "to explore" list :)

I would consider changing organizations to be an immense cost. It would be perfectly reasonable to apply stoic principles to make peace with language choice. Many of the costs associated from using a tool one believes is inferior are related to one's own emotional reaction to it. If you can conquer that, then you've made yourself a lot more flexible.

I can't imagine how anyone could claim that changing organizations is something that's easy. :-/

Thanks for your comment on charity. I admit that I came on a bit strong after rereading my comment. I sometimes get frustrated quite a bit with your commentary on Go, and I let it get the best of me. Sorry about that.

Perhaps then the stoic lesson is we should write some machine code from time to time to really enjoy the benefits of anything above. Or, to relate, writing a bit of Go for some time when you mostly write Haskell.

It's significantly harder for an organization of 10+ developers to change from a single language to another single language without a technically savvy and respected manager just mandating what it will be.

Other times, though, being forced to work with obtuse tools feels like trying to construct a skyscraper out of sticks and dog crap. No matter how elegant a structure you manage to construct, doing so is a miserable experience because you're never able to transcend the feeling that you're working with twigs and poo.

As someone whos written code in Haskell (even some medium sized programs) and moved on just fine, no.

Frankly, Haskell can be an excercise in frustration.

Choosing a language that makes these things difficult, is a poor choice. We should not accept subpar languages to be used just because.

I think the problem lies in the fact many programmers don't have the luxury of making those decisions. I imagine if one of those programmers refused to use the mandated tools, they'd get the sack. Many of those programmers, again, don't have the leg room to handle that. Plus, I don't think any employer would look favourably on "I got sacked because I refused to use language X because language Y is superior". I know that isn't the kind of attitude to work I would appreciate.

The companies that allow freedom of choice in tools and languages are perhaps the best companies to work for. Unfortunately, those companies hire the best programmers in the first place, or at least set the bar with that in mind. Most programmers, including myself, are not of this calibre.

Source: at a previous job we had a "use whatever tool you want, just get the job done" policy. After two years we had everything from Perl to JavaScript in the same project.

Edit: ... and this project was a desktop application!

Perhaps we are unearthing various kinds of choices i.e choices for best fit vs best convenience. Perhaps that's a case of engineering vs something other.

Also, the newer parts of the language such as the object system and the presence of closures and first class functions are almost pleasant to work with: for the most part, the annoyances come from the old stuff

I abused Ruby's metaprogramming capabilities to build a small functional language with operators. I monkey patched symbols with operator overloading to add the typical functional operators such as composition (using * since . isn't possible). I created operators for piping, partial application, etc. Terrible abuses that probably reduced inter-library and future compatibility to 0.

I don't think that would be possible in any way with PHP without PECL (there is an extension for operator overloading magic methods) whereas it is with Ruby out the box.

If the language allows me to abuse it in such a way more than another, I reckon it holds more expressive power. Case in point: Lisp.

bad programmers do that. As professionals, we should refuse to implement something in the wrong language and allow somebody else to do the job.

That said FP/Lisp are very hard to leave, I can understand that.

Just the other day I was struggling with the hopeless nightmare of Java's lack of true first class functions (but still having some first class function like semantics) combined with embedded classes restrictions combined with generics thrown in for good measure (AsyncTask embedding in an activity and updating result in the activity).

Go features are clearly specified in a very readable and fairly concise spec and guide and its features fit seamlessly together virtually every time​

I see statements like this a lot from Haskellers and I think its overstated. Anecdotally, after going from Python to spending 3-4 years in Haskell then going back to a dynamic language (Elixir) I've come to the conclusion that how you think when programming is very much a learned trait that works for that language. It's neither good or bad, but it's educational nonetheless. Haskell and other languages like it forces you to have a very unique mindset that can overpower previously learned languages not like it. And it's in no way permanent.

After I stopped using Haskell I was like "ugh, I need types! wth!". I wanted to go back to Haskell only out of familiarity, but as I continued after a short while I wasn't even thinking like that anymore. The thought rarely occurred. I stopped thinking in Haskell and started thinking in Elixir.

I don't think it's entirely placebo or emotional drive too, because I really liked the Java OOP world at first, and went deep into it; but got nothing.

I have come to think that it is precisely when the language switch feels the worst, the learning is the most beneficial for long term. If it is popular and you feel like it does not really work, it means you have conceptual learning to do.

https://youtu.be/yyzK6e6py9A?t=7

Seriously though, I think Elixir (with its guards and pattern-matching facilities) occupies a nice middle ground between strict static typing and the dynamic typing of procedural/OO langs.

However I switched from Python to Scala and besides the performance issues and the poor handling of async I/O that I had with Python, by far the biggest problem with Python was all the insecurity while developing with it. It drove me insane, because we had a production system that always had problems due to how poorly Python's ecosystem treats errors.

Just to give an example, at that time we were using BeautifulSoup to do HTML parsing, a library resembling JQuery, except that BeautifulSoup can return nulls all over the place and no matter how defensive I got in my coding, null pointer exceptions still happened. And what was the solution for async I/O in Python? Monkey patching the socket module by means of Gevent or Eventlet of course, which didn't work for native clients (e.g. MySQL's) and if this wasn't problematic enough, you had to guess what worked or not and when. The worst kind of magic possible.

When I switched to Scala, all of these problems vanished. This isn't about having tests either, because tests only test for the behavior you can foresee, unless you do property-based testing with auto-generated random data and in this regard static languages like Scala and Haskell also rule due to the availability of QuickCheck / ScalaCheck.

You see, my Python codebase got really bad because of fear of refactoring. Yes, even with plenty of tests and good code coverage. Because actually the tests themselves became a barrier for refactoring, because in a language like Python there is no such thing as information hiding and coupled with dynamic typing, it means that your tests end up tightly coupled with implementation details, will break on correct refactoring and will be hard to fix.

Nowadays when I'm doing refactoring with Scala, most of the time it simply works as soon as the compiler is happy. Some people bitch and moan about that compiler being kind of slow and it is, but the things that it can prove about your code would require specialized and expensive tools for other languages and that wouldn't do such a good job.

Going back to dynamic languages, there are also languages like Clojure, which get by with sane defaults. For example in practice Clojure doesn't do OOP-style dynamic dispatching most of the time and functions are usually multi-variadic and capable of handling nil values gracefully. This is not enforced by the language, being simply a hygienic rule accepted by the community. However, relying on such conventions requires (a) capable developers that (b) agree on what the best practices should be.

And the issue that people miss when thinking of the merits of such languages is that smaller communities are always homogeneous. So when giving as example a language like Elixir, if it hasn't drove you insane yet, well, you have to take into account that Elixir might not be popular enough.

So basically I prefer strong static typing because I'm not smart enough or wise enough to seek and follow best practices as often as I'd like and because I don't have much faith that other people in the community can do that either, especially after that community grows. The biggest irony imo is that Python is right now the anti-thesis of TOOWTDI.

  > because in a language like Python there is no such thing as
  > information hiding and coupled with dynamic typing, it
  > means that your tests end up tightly coupled with
  > implementation details, will break on correct refactoring
  > and will be hard to fix.

* An argument might be an int when you expected a float. This can be addressed by casting things with `float()` in every entrypoint, but it's more defensive to require a float and error out otherwise. Either way, problems only appear at runtime. * An object might be null and this only gets picked up at runtime - using Rust it's been very nice to have to explicitly say when things can be null.

I've found it can feel like luck when a complex Python program works correctly for real-world input, but it's also very powerful at getting something done. Tradeoffs.

This point actually frustrates me greatly about C# 7. At some point, there was talk about non-nullable references being introduced into the language, which has been put on hold for at least another version. Personally, I think that feature should have been in the language since version 1. Every runtime error due to a null reference is one too many.

  public struct NotNull<T>
  {
    private readonly T val;
    public T Value { 
      get { return val; } 
    }
    public NotNull(T v)
    {
        if (v==null) 
          throw new Exception(); 
        val = v;
    }
  }

I thinks this is why they pulled non-nullable types from C# - they couldn't figure out what to do in this case. If I were them I would force the constructor of FOO to blow up on exit if xxx is not populated. That would help a little bit. Although it still causes problems if a method is invoked from the constructor.

So yeah, it's a tough problem. Maybe they could add a check when a field of type NotNull<T> is read to throw an exception? That way you're still possibly in trouble when reading a field, but at least you can be confident that if you receive a method parameter NotNull<T> you know it's not null.

Things like this have to be implemented properly. The problem is that this ties into the core architecture of the platform, not only the language - references are basically the most important implicit primitive there is in the CLR (implicit because not even the IL handles them like the other datatypes).

I'm not very informed on the subject, but I suspect that without a proper way to declare locals and members non-nullable in the CLR, the matter would get rather complicated - there'd be no possibility to communicate the requirement through method signatures, for example. And since you could call pretty much any C# method from other languages, I'd expect various problems there.

Of course, one option would be to only handle the initialization and assignment checks in the C# compiler (I guess that would be much easier) and simply generate conditional ArgumentNullExceptions in every method, but I suspect that this would be a problem for performance reasons.

You can hide all the details you want in the language, unless it's a pure function, there's side effects that can be relied on improperly. Often times this is because of hiding implementation details. A GenerateCert function might read from a config file. It hides the detail that the config file exists, but then to test it you need to create the file in the right spot.

Yes, testing Add(int, int) is easy in any language. No one's struggling with those tests.

Maybe one could write Python and turn a "strict" flag for the module (project?) where you'd have to fill in the types and it becomes Scala-like.

This sentiment seems commonly shared, but by no means universally.

http://mypy-lang.org/

I would agree that the Elixir community is currently very homogeneous and therefore very pleasant. To some extent, that is true of many new langs and their early communities. I disagree that this is a premature strike against it. I say enjoy it (and work within it) while it lasts, if you can.

However Scala is the perfect example for my opinion though - people perceive it as a TIMTOWTDI language, but that's because it got an influx of developers from other communities, the most representative IMO being Java, Ruby, Erlang and Haskell. After all, a determined Java/Ruby/Erlang/Haskell developer can continue to program Java/Ruby/Erlang/Haskell in any language, especially if that language is expressive enough to allow it.

Having such an influx gave rise to different opinions and mentalities of how to do things. Speaking of the web crowd, there's a big difference between Scalatra (see scalatra.org) which appeals to a Ruby crowd and relies on un-typed and unsafe APIs with baked in mutation, versus Http4s or Finch, which are very FP and typeful, versus Play Framework which takes a more balanced approach, being like a Rails framework (including the kitchen sink), but with sanity and types.

And the Scala community is actually on a convergence path right now, due to better books, tools and libraries. Which for me actually doesn't matter that much, because in Scala I can rely on the compiler such that my code is not so dependent on learning and applying best practices, when compared with other languages.

I was NOT saying that Elixir is pleasant because it is unpopular. I am saying that this might be a factor, that I suspect that in such instances the social aspect plays a larger role than we give it credit, especially when dynamic typing is involved, because with dynamic typing you rely on agreed upon best practices that the community must push forward, much more than static language proponents need to do. And personally I think that a language's technical merits should be judged after it gets popular enough to see an influx of developers with strong opinions from other languages.

E.g. in a static language a Maybe/Option value forces you to deal with the possibility of a value missing, whether you want to or not, being also useful as documentation that's always up to date. Whereas in a dynamic language you have to rely on documentation (poorly updated because it's the last thing that people update), soft community rules, taboos, etc in order to do the right thing.

Something about Haskell strikes me as different. Despite the buzz about it, I don't see many projects for it other than shellcheck, pandoc and xmonad, and for two of those, there's better solutions around (sphinx, awesome/i3).

The other thing is the general flow I've see with Haskell programmers, many really tie down their identity do it. They see programming as a crossword puzzle for them to solve in short term, not as something other programmers have to read later on. They're not very empathetic to the idea the runways dwindling and you have to ship sooner rather than later.

In addition, I found that the Scala / Haskell developers I knew took golang to be quite the nuisance. They find gophers pesky. I think the reason why is years of Haskell teaches them to overengineer and complicate things needlessly. It's frustrating because they're not aware of it themselves and take offense, even blame you when you point it out to them.

Maybe I've just been unlucky. In 10 years, I've never had people who consistently failed to ship, been mean and arrogant as scala / haskell programmers. They take the slight criticism as an assault on their identity.

I tried awesome for two weeks and had one crash. I've run XMonad for 5+ years and had no crashes. Just because they are supposed to accomplish the same things does not mean that they're equal. One is better and it's because of the choice of language.

It's very hard to take your post seriously when you include something like this in it and you don't bother to qualify it even in the slightest.

I looked in your history and yup, you are partial to Haskell. Why do you feel a need to immediately judge. Why did you say "hard to take seriously". Why didn't you just ask politely for more details? In my opinion, you already had your mind made up. Just like the blog poster did.

> I tried awesome for two weeks and had one crash. I've run XMonad for 5+ years and had no crashes.

That's your personal anecdote. There's no evidence that the language could have prevented the crash.

And that doesn't make the window manager "better", which is subjective. What are more people using? Awesome and i3. Primarily because they don't want to deal with Haskell when they could be doing lua or a simple config.

It's convenient that you have no post history to go through, since you decided that the nonsense you're posting shouldn't be tied to your real account.

Your bias is astounding, yet you go for the "your mind was already made up" card. I like Haskell but by no means am I tied to any single language and I'm not the one making posts about how all the users of a language seem to have undesirable traits.

Even better, you then criticize using "personal anecdotes", when that's exactly what you did in order to condemn the users of two languages. You half-dampen it by saying "Maybe I'm just unlucky", but the entire point of your post is "these two communities suck".

> That's your personal anecdote. There's no evidence that the language could have prevented the crash.

Any ML-family compiler will catch more crap at compile time than any C compiler. Adding lua on top will not solve any of that. None of that is opinion. It's just how the languages are designed and how they use types. Adding automatic memory management to that makes the gap even wider and in short, that stops the vast majority of crashes that you can get.

C + lua is great for lots of things, but everything is a tradeoff and here the tradeoff is that you're very likely to get crashes. Good intentions alone can't prevent segfaults and most C software is proof of that.

Then blaming me for being biased as if you don't already have a conclusion derived. This is the behavior I experienced - to me, this feels like projection and trying to bully me into silencing what I truly witnessed. It really bothers me and makes me uncomfortable.

I'm just stating my experiences. You wanna know why I use a throwaway? Because people bully and bludgeon anyone who doesn't praise Haskell and / or Scala. And it's been unique to those language communities.

At the end of the day, your reaction is predictable. I'm not reading too deeply into what you say because, like my prior experiences, I think you have your mind up, and in spite or proof given, you're going to be on the defense / offense.

> Any ML-family compiler will catch more crap at compile time than any C compiler...

None of these things about language mattered since awesome and i3 had language as an afterthought and focused on experience. xmonad literally has haskell mentioned as a feature, the token battlestation pic (which is pretty cool) even has a haskell book next to it. Xmonad even uses haskell for the configuration of it.

Look, not trying to take a jab at hobbyists. It's just I'm saying, in my experience, I found Haskell and scala "hobbyists" to be quite mean and it hurt my feelings alot, especially when I dropped, far more politely than when they ever spoke to me, the news they're not focused on business goals and work product and just refactoring stuff over and over. They kind of failed at bringing product vision to light, even basic things like defining requirements felt beneath them. Again, maybe I've just been unlucky.

The irony is that you came out to defend Go from any sort of criticism without any direct argument as to why Haskell is bad. Your post talks about the people who use it and criticizes them for criticizing other programmers, yet that reflects perfectly on what you are doing. And yes, I am also defending Haskell when I see your comment. I'm sure Node.js programmers would defend Node.js. Programmers care about their language choice as much as they care about their text editor/IDE choice, and it's something that we all love to argue about.

>At the end of the day, your reaction is predictable. I'm not reading too deeply into what you say because, like my prior experiences, I think you have your mind up, and in spite or proof given, you're going to be on the defense / offense.

So you haven't made up your mind already by criticizing Haskell before even evaluating it as a language? It's not making up your mind on it when you based all your judgements from personal anecdotes of Haskell and Scala programmers you've met before?

>xmonad literally has haskell mentioned as a feature

AwesomeWM lists Lua as a feature [1]. Maybe Haskell programmers care about that a bit more strongly, but both groups use their configuration language as a feature. Hyper lists JS/HTML/CSS as a feature as well [2]. Although I would argue the real argument between Haskell and other languages is safety -- just like Rust or Ada programmers would list those languages as a safety feature, Haskell programmers are inclined to do the same. It's pretty similar to saying "code has been tested extensively by our quality assurance team" or something "code has been formally verified," etc.

[1] https://awesomewm.org/ [2] https://hyper.is/

Also, I looked through your history, you're a Haskell programmer. Due to the context of my thread, I'd appreciate it if you disclosed your relation so others know.

> AwesomeWM lists Lua as a feature

It's a scripting language on top of that's used for configuration.

> It's pretty similar to saying "code has been tested extensively by our quality assurance team" or something "code has been formally verified,"

The problem is Haskell developers aren't really getting enough shipped, especially relative to the advocacy I see of it. So how much does code correctness matter?

Look, let's say I want play FreeCiv. It being programmed in C vs Haskell vs Erlang doesn't mean much to me.

But imagine if FreeCiv lacked basic functionality or code documentation, and when people mentioned these things they'd get jumped by people who advocate it being programmed in an esoteric language who look down on those who program C as unsafe, inefficient, etc.

> So you haven't made up your mind already by criticizing Haskell before even evaluating it as a language? It's not making up your mind on it when you based all your judgements from personal anecdotes of Haskell and Scala programmers you've met before?

Hugo vs Pandoc

Awesome/i3 vs xmonad

You want to know why these solutions got more popular than the their Haskell predecessors? They had devops like documentation and tooling down. They picked languages that were easier to read so the community could participate. The discussion was about how to ship features by a version release, not how to force the language to get a purely internal technical working.

Users can't see the internals, so they don't care. They want something that's there for them on time and reliably. In all these years to this day, there's been more advocating Haskell philosophically on forums than there's been real discussion about getting stuff shipped. Try saying that for node/go/ruby/python.

I did submit a bug report and it did get fixed, but there was another crash I couldn't be bothered to try to track down, and just switched back to the standard ubuntu shell.

Interesting. What was the bug, if I may ask? Do you have a URL for it and the resolution to it?

What do you mean, you "switched back to the standard Ubuntu shell", exactly? XMonad is a window manager, it has nothing to do with shells.

On top of that, do you mean you switched back to bash, which is the standard shell of most distros, or do you really mean you switched to the standard Ubuntu terminal emulator?

There are a few things that need clarification, as what you've said doesn't make much sense in the context of window managers.

I'll try and look up the bug.

I started out liking Haskell too! But has I moved along with my small evaluation api project it felt more and more like I was trying to cut wood with gyroscopic laser saw. It worked but it was a lot of fan fair for sawing some wood.

Picked up erlang/elixir. Looked pretty decent. Felt like cutting wood with a Japanese pull saw, so I had to use the vise clamps that came with it. It cut some fucking wood.

~ Ron Swanson out.

Also since erlang has excellent pattern matching (even on binary data!) and a supervisor system (OTP) errors are easy to recover from. Erlang takes a very pragmatic approach of building tools that deal with errors by recovering from them instead of trying to exhaustively trying to prevent them.

but as someone striking out into the elixir camp/world, this is also what I'm seeing

So have you checked out rust?

Rust doesn't have lazy evaluation, or a particularly extensive standard library. I'm not aware that Rust has heap or thread profiling any better than Go's.

For everything else, though, yes. I found Rust pretty easy to learn (coming from Java with a bit of Python background); i haven't mastered lifetimes or coherence, but i manage my day-to-day work without needing to. No GC means no GC pauses, and if there are big slow drop cascades, they are at least confined to one thread. Rustfmt seems to be mostly reasonable. Library versioning is done properly. The type system provides generics, sum types, and strong, if unconventional, control over side effects. Godoc uses source order and Markdown. Struct fields have to be initialized. Boilerplate is minimal; in particular, checking errors is one character, and sorting detects and uses an existing. ordering, or takes a single function to define one.

But "promising" doesn't mean I'd replace the few use-cases where Go currently shines for me (wouldn't recommend it for any-and-all development at all, but there are select cases where I currently absolutely wouldn't use anything else) as these are those few programs where I really want to write (and later, read) exactly step-by-step "almost machine instructions" and where the only "expressiveness" needed is already fully afforded by Go and quite well at that. Dev-related mostly bulk-file-processing-based custom tooling (not bad to fire off sizable amounts of automatic background transformations from one weird format to another on file-system events etc.) .... filters through which to pipe vast/continuous data streams with just-some-processing over it .... providing out-of-process certain "low-level, must be lightning fast" tasks and logic with IPC for a higher-level codebase .... it's a great tool for such cases, especially given how simple the syntax is. Ie. the basics are grasped very easily very quickly and you don't have to recall "its pattern matching syntax and quirks, its generics syntax and quirks, its etc etc". =) I'm perplexed when teams choose to express their entire domain model or startup in Go, however.. fair game, maybe I'm missing something there

Needs more context. It's more mature for some things than others, like many young languages.

> how are compile times

Not Go, for sure, but not the worst either.

> how much of a priority are they

Getting them down is a high priority, but has taken some time to make a dent in. The last few releases have all posted speed ups, and "cargo check" in the last release helps. Incremental recompilation is coming, you can try its initial implementation on nightly today. There's a lot more to do, but users really want improvements, so it is and will continue to be actively worked on.

Good to hear, when that is in place compile times matter a whole lot less

I never get the compile time argument. Well I code a big Scala application and the most time it spents is integration testing. the 10 minute test suite would probably still run 9 minutes and 30 seconds on go. we heavily rely on the database and cover a lot of concurrency/parallelism things in our tests. some things which we would need to test in go, too.

the compile time argument always looks good on first, but later on it's just a dumb way to prefer a language since it never matters. (Actually even the go maintainers didn't cared for a while about the compiler performance).

It's great to be able to compile applications like kubernetes in 2 minutes.

1 - https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/03/16/Rust-1.16.html

On the contrary, you haven't pointed out an objective issue that you have with Go. You offered some harsh remarks about the language but backed them up with praise.

I'd say you love the language, but apologetically so. You shouldn't it's a great language.

If ever you decide it's not for you then look at other alternatives, rust being one them.

I just think for me it absolutely shines for certain use-cases and sucks for many others, where I simply won't use it. The question then becomes "why Rust over [Haskell&friends]", not "why Rust over Go" ;)

Right now I'm keen to get more personal experience with Rust, and hopefully in the wider team. I'm particularly interested in [Tokio](https://tokio.rs/), which should address some of our concerns about the existing concurrency support.

Also, in same reddit comments there's a longer (quite argumentative) discussion on Rust concurrency that you might be interested in: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5fyhjb/golangs...

Personally, as a frequent Haskell user, I'm looking forward to replacing embedded C/C++ with Rust as soon as they get the AVR toolchain figured out and there's better support for common ARM uCs.

Those are things that suck about go; it's not specifically that they suck about go when compared to haskell; they just generally suck (particularly the type system stuff).

However, I don't think that the situation is so bad I would go as far as to say, "Other than that, I will probably never choose to use Go for anything ever again..."

I maintain that while go might not give smart programmers the flexibility to express their FP dreams, it has a grungy practicality both for developing and maintaining code that is quite effective.

Introducing go and building applications with it in a team is easy because its quick to pick up for the whole team, regardless of background, its simple to use and its (relatively) difficult to shoot yourself in the foot in terms of distributing binaries or developing applications that run at modest scale.

When gogland (the IDE by jetbrains) comes out of EAP, it'll even have a modestly good professional IDE with integrated debugger (no atom, you don't count when your debugger never works on any platform).

...but hey, if you don't like it, don't use it.

Haskell is pretty great too.

Sure there were languages with such type systems before, and we managed to deliver our work with them.

However I don't want to work in 2017 as I used to work in the mid-90's, when templates were an experimental feature in C++, or the only MLs we knew were Caml Light, Miranda and SML.

The world has moved on.

Man, how long will this meme survive? Go only initially originated with some Google developers, it's not in any way "Google's answer to Apple's and Microsoft's strategically-important and accordingly-subsidized-and-evangelized-and-invested-in languages". Just picture a handful of (previously "accomplished" in the field, as it turns out though) guys thinking "this company has a wide mess of Python etc scripts that should really be C programs, except for the problems this would pose"..

If Google wouldn't agree with their actions, or did not pay to increase the team size, they would be developing the language outside Google walls.

Go looks far more independent from Google in branding, sponsorship and references from official Google products.

As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the power continuum, he knows he's looking down. Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used to. But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub.

When we switch to the point of view of a programmer using any of the languages higher up the power continuum, however, we find that he in turn looks down upon Blub. How can you get anything done in Blub? It doesn't even have y.

By induction, the only programmers in a position to see all the differences in power between the various languages are those who understand the most powerful one. (This is probably what Eric Raymond meant about Lisp making you a better programmer.) You can't trust the opinions of the others, because of the Blub paradox: they're satisfied with whatever language they happen to use, because it dictates the way they think about programs.

It does not necessarily mean that any dev can code faster – or even similarily fast. But it means that much of refactoring usually is easier (as you’ll have less duplicated code), that you get more guarantees, that you have less boilerplate, etc.

I have three priorities when programming:

  1. Correct
  2. Understandable
  3. Fast

Being able to produce code quickly is nice, but unimportant if the code isn't likely to be correct, understandable or fast. Productivity in production code is measured in how you achieve the above.

Likewise it is nice to have code that is easy to refactor and doesn't require duplication, but duplication is more permissible than the dogmatic avoidance of duplication when it is detrimental to understanding or speed. It can also lead to unnecessarily bothersome abstraction or spending too much time creating abstraction where the domain doesn't naturally lend itself to abstraction.

(Note that points 2 and 1 tend to dictate that duplication should be avoided: it isn't about the typing saved, it is about correctness.)

Priority 3 could be elaborated as "quick response times and avoidance of unnecessary resource use". Any idiot can write code that does X. A craftsperson writes code that does X well. A valuable craftsperson can do X well and quickly. Be a craftsperson.

For rapid prototyping you can throw the rules slightly overboard, but when you write production code things count.

Abstractions and language mechanisms that can give you static guarantees are good when they help you achieve the above. They are counter-productive when they conflict with any of the above. It is easy to become counter-productive when you try to satisfy some dogma.

Generics, and annotation processing with code generation integrated in the compiler, are two example features supported by Java that improve this.

Haskell obviously is a lot better even.

Additionally, it’s also a question if, in the language, any state of the program is immediately obvious from the code – or if the syntax hides things (such as Go’s multi-return errors vs. Java’s exceptions, although Java could use an "ignore" keyword to ignore any error happening in a block or statement)

A powerful static type system can express everything a dynamic type system can, and more. (That’s why I tend to err towards static typing)

Also, just something I noticed after almost two years of Go. Thanks to library quality I usually end up writing much less Go than Java/Scala for similar applications.

I have yet to figure out precisely what it is that makes me more productive in Go (which I have relatively little experience with) than Java (which I've programmed since the first beta).

The Go community also prefers libraries over frameworks. Coming from Java, and its humongous, cancerous framworks, that's a BIG selling point. I notice that when someone posts a link to a "Go framework" I get slightly ticked off and I feel resistance even before I've clicked the link.

As for the language: I don't know yet. It just works for me. :)

For Java, with a tiny library, you can have real Either monads: https://github.com/spencerwi/Either.java

I use them in lots of code.

For Go, you end up with an assignment syntax where you have to manually check, and get no compiler safety. At all.

What do you mean with no compiler safety exactly?

Any code that compiles should not be able to ever segfault or have NullPointerExceptions or similar.

Anyways, it's true, I miss pattern matching on errors.

However, in practice, you just get used to it. I haven't had a situation in the past half year where I'd forget to handle the error / check it.

But with the same argument, you could as well use PHP7.

And this still doesn’t allow you to replace all stdlib datatypes with your own implementations without using custom precompilers.

(As I’ve done in Java!)

To replace existing implementations with your own, because you want a LinkedArrayList (a linked list of blocks)? Or because you want a TreeMap instead of a HashMap, or a Set with different implementation?

Because you want to implement your own Either type to better handle return values (see https://github.com/spencerwi/Either.java )?

Thing is, in practice you usually don't need special generic containers. And when I actually need it, I'll just code up a non-generic implementation. When I need a complex type system I'll use Scala.

This allows me to have fully reactive collections in Java, lazy reactive collections, and more.

I can just connect to a socket transmitting updates with netty, write a transformer, apply those to a lazy reactive collection, and have the changes directly appear in the list in the UI, fully threadsafe.

Writing those things again, and again, every time, would be far more work, and increase the time I need to write code massively.

I’ve actually used go a bit, and tried reimplementing several of my projects in go, but either it wasn’t easily possible, or I had to translate dozens of generic classes into hundreds of non-generic versions, with lots of duplicated code.

And then I had found a bug, fixed it at one point, and had to copy it to hundreds of files.

In the future I’ll use it likely with QuasselDroid-NG, an app of mine that’s very early in development, and for which I developed it.

The use case there is that we have a list of IRC messages, constantly updating and adding messages at any point of the list, and we want to update the UI and animate.

The client can also cache, or preload, messages at any point, or throw them away.

Additionally, users can filter, search, or choose to disable some messages.

Other messages might get merged, or synthetic ones inserted.

So I have a backing store of messages that can constantly change, I have on top of that a stream of transformations taking part, and on top of that an interface presenting a single, consistent Java List, but also triggering the relevant updates on Android’s recyclerview.

Most importantly, you can just add a message to the lowest list, it will be properly filtered, transformed, animated, and displayed, and this properly threadsafe across UI thread, backend thread, and filtering threadpool, while being faster than the solutions Realms and co provide for such updated UI.

I tried to reimplement the desktop version with Go, due to native UI bindings. And failed.

For the UI part: no wonder, Go, at least currently, is useless for UI's.

The problem is that I try to abstract these things away – in Java, I have a general framework, and just do

    var c = new ObservableCollection<Message>();
    var f = new AsyncObservableFilter<Message>();
    f.setSource(c);
    f.addFilter(new DayChangeMessageFilter());
    f.addFilter(new CollapseJoinLeaveMessageFilter());
    f.addFilter(new RemoveIgnoredMessagesFilter());
    var adapter = new ObservableAdapter<Message, MessageViewHolder>();
    adapter.setCollection(f.getResultCollection());

    c.add(new Message(new Date(), "cube2222", "Well, I don't see any problems with the logic part."));

I’m using it with over 11 different types in the Java version, and I’d have to maintain 11 identical, but with different types, versions in the Go version.

You can understand how much of a pain in the ass this is.

Oh, btw, this also abstracts away the entire thread handling, while still doing it in a reasonable way.

And the backing collection doesn’t have to be a normal ObservableCollection storing data in memory – I also have ones using SQLite as backend, or caches, and I have the ability to add listeners for scrolling up or down to load or unload data as well, if it’s not needed anymore.

In Go, I’d manually have to reify all these, and if I find a bug in one, I’d have to update all of the others, too.

If the genericism for you is also abstracting away the source of the messages -> in Go you just usually abstract sources as io.Readers.

All filters can easily be an intermediate channel which only sends further proper messages. Or just write a filter(func (m Message) bool) function which abstracts that away.

Though I understand you may want to use your Reactive collections and streams, this isn't really a case for Go.

Have I understood your use-case correctly?