{"id":2511,"date":"2019-03-26T10:18:49","date_gmt":"2019-03-26T14:18:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.soul-repairs.com\/blog\/?p=2511"},"modified":"2019-02-28T17:26:47","modified_gmt":"2019-02-28T22:26:47","slug":"go-a-grumpy-old-developers-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/soul-repairs.com\/blog\/2019\/03\/26\/go-a-grumpy-old-developers-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Go: a Grumpy Old Developer\u2019s Review"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
An artist’s rendition of Josh.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I first started programming<\/a><\/span> in C, about twenty years ago. I pretty regularly call myself a grumpy old man – I always thought that describing myself as “grumpy” was legit, but that the “old” was a joke. <\/span><\/p>\n

It turns out that twenty years is a long time.\u00a0\"\"<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve got my copy of K&R<\/a><\/span> (if you don’t what K&R is [like Laine didn’t, who is apparently neither grumpy NOR old…], sigh\/get off my lawn<\/em>, look up the authors<\/a>), and it\u2019s still my favorite programming book. I still love the simplicity of the C language. I\u2019ve written in languages that do garbage collection and languages that don\u2019t even bother to mention that they do garbage collection for you. I\u2019ve seen so many different kinds of inheritance it makes me mildly disturbed to think about it.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve learned JEE<\/a>, Spring<\/a>, and Spring Boot<\/a>, and I’ve wandered around other people\u2019s Python<\/a> code. But I still have my love for C<\/em>. It\u2019s easy for me to read, easy for me to follow, and unless you\u2019re doing something dumb with pointers, it\u2019s pretty easy to figure out what you\u2019re doing, and what you\u2019re doing wrong.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

What is Go?<\/span><\/h2>\n

Go (often referred to as Golang) is a statically typed, compiled programming language designed at Google by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. Go is syntactically similar to C, but with the added benefits of memory safety, garbage collection, structural typing, and CSP-style concurrency. (Thanks, Wikipedia!<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
The Go Gopher<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Go<\/a> is a relatively simple<\/strong> language<\/span>. <\/span>It runs fast<\/strong>, and it can be (and is!) used for most anything, from simple script work to heavyweight applications and services. It’s a general purpose language like Java but it doesn’t require a JVM or interpreter.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span>It\u2019s <\/span>safe <\/span><\/strong>because variables can\u2019t be magically converted – so you always know an int<\/code> is an int<\/code>.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

In C, you can take a memory pointer and do some math to get to other memory spaces – including memory spaces for other<\/em> programs. Go, on the other hand, doesn’t allow for Pointer Math of Dubious Magic and so is much more memory-safe<\/strong>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why Make Go?<\/span><\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Every language solves some of the problems of the ones that came before it. Really good languages solve almost all of the problems of their predecessors, while some languages just…make things more complicated than necessary.<\/span><\/p>\n

Go is a reaction to languages that were easy to <\/span>start<\/em> but later made you want to die because they had unpredictable behavior or poor performance. For example, <\/span>JavaScript can be dangerous from a type-safety and parallel processing standpoint and interpreted languages like Ruby and Python\u00a0aren\u2019t very performant.<\/span><\/p>\n

Go was also<\/em> a reaction to languages like C, which is simple and usually very fast but had some complications (e.g. header files) and was missing a lot of modern niceties (garbage collection, memory safety)<\/span>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What\u2019s my Take? (tl;dr)<\/span><\/h2>\n

\"\"As an old C programmer, Go is pretty good. Its similarities to C are useful and familiar. Basically, it’s less garbage than everything else, and it delivers on what it set out to do. It\u2019s like getting into your car<\/del> ten-year-old-Buick that you love, and you know how it works, and then you find that it has all kinds of new tricks it can deliver.<\/p>\n

People who should give Go a shot<\/h3>\n