filter VS go

Here’s Rob Pike’s (one of the original Go designers) attempt to “see what the hubbub is all about”: https://github.com/robpike/filter

I find the language really solid but asking on r/golang is quite an adventure. It's extremely distant from go's spirit, the grammar is even more rich than Rust. Typical example: let, run, with, apply, and also - they all practically do the same but with a different scope of this and return value. Just looking at the flow API can get your head spinning. To illustrate how much it's completely the opposite of Go, see how Rob Pike pokes fun at map/filter and tells people they should not use it . I guess you can't force all developers to adhere to this mental model, but that's about it, but that's about it, technical arguments are irrelevant except for extremely niche concerns about memory and startup time

I mean sure, let's praise the ergonomics of channels and the reliability of maps. As for datastructures, we already have datastructures at home . They just work fine. Nobody needs more than that because rob pike told us so

Go will never have a map/filter syntax, to the point rob pike even makes fun of it , do you really want to use it for that kind of domain ?

Also since generators are mentioned I recently came across this rob pike moment, he implemented a reduce function that takes and returns all interface{} types and uses reflection to check if the call is valid at runtime - that's the most typical Go that can ever be written in 40 lines - all that to make the point that it's useless. Such a great spirit. https://github.com/robpike/filter

A few points that stood out to me: error handling in Go is generally pretty good. It's much more performant compared to throwing exceptions and the high frequency of error handling helps a lot with debugging and avoiding unexpected errors. What you've described as "poor OOP'ish" is partly true, yes Go does poor OOP, because it doesn't try to do OOP. The language favours composition over inheritance. Strongly applying OOP concepts in Go is simply not using the language in its intended way. For implicit interfaces, it's completely fair that you don't like them, but it's not a disadvantage of the language. I for one find implicit interfaces very intuitive and feel it's the right way for it to be done. No function overloading and lack of ternary operations is absolutely intentional, both of these are overcome by writing more expressive code, which is not a bad thing. Similarly with no built in map/filter/find, these can be achieved using for-loops. Reference https://github.com/robpike/filter for Rob Pike's implementation of filter, stating in the readme that there's not much use for it and to just use for-loops instead. Last thing, enums are expressed using iota: https://go.dev/ref/spec#Iota

> I didn't get that desire for purity that you gleaned from it.

'Folks who develop an allergic reaction to "big balls of mutable state without sum types" tend to gravitate towards languages that gives them control over mutability, lifetimes, and lets them build abstractions.'

This mutability argument is present throughout the article. Seems like nothing sans Rust or niche functional languages is enough.

> Nil pointer exceptions, for example, don't have to exist anymore..

The language most notorious for those is Java due to almost everything being passed via a nullable reference. When everything can be nullable, how can you know where to check for it? Go addresses this to an extent by explicitly separating pointers from values. Values are the default and cannot be nil, so the opportunity for null dereferences is greatly diminished. It's not a perfect solution, but it's not nothing either.

> and yet they do in Go because they couldn't be bothered to add sum types.

Damn those lazy Go devs!

> Its type system is barely a step above a dynamic language.

Turns out even a basic type system is a huge improvement over none. Just being able to restrict values to concrete types goes a long way.

> You have to write the same imperative looping code over and over because Rob Pike would rather just use a for loop than something mildly expressive like map or filter (https://github.com/robpike/filter).

There are arguments to be made either way, but I definitely agree generics (along with iterators) should have been there since day 1.

> Every function that does meaningful work is littered with if err != nil { return err }.

One big positive of this that I don't see in other languages is every `return` in a function must be on the start of a line. That is, every single exit path of a function is easily findable by visually scanning

Make sure you have Go installed https://go.dev/.

The Go Programming Language

When Go first shipped, it was already well-documented that the only stable ABI on some platforms was via dynamic libraries (such as libc) provided by said platforms. Go knowingly and deliberately ignored this on the assumption that they can get away with it. And then this happened:

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/16606

If that's not "getting burned", I don't know what is. "Trying to provide a nice feature" is an excuse, and it can be argued that it is a valid one, but nevertheless they knew that they were using an unstable ABI that could be pulled out from under them at any moment, and decided that it's worth the risk. I don't see what that has to do with "not being as broadly compatible as they had hoped", since it was all known well in advance.

Sadly, I think that is indeed radically different from Go’s design. Go lacks anything like sum types, and proposals to add them to the language have revealed deep issues that have stalled any development. See https://github.com/golang/go/issues/57644

I've been writing a lot about Go and gRPC lately:

I have a mountain of respect for Bell Labs and its contributions to the public welfare, and a lot of respect for the current group of alumni, mostly at Google, and mostly affiliated to a greater or lesser degree with golang. I have my differences with one or two of them (Pike telegraphs a wildly overcompensated imposter syndrome, but he’s almost as much of a genius as he acts like he is and who am I to judge on an overcompensated imposter syndrome, moreover when the guy in at the next desk over is Ken Thompson, who wouldn’t be a little intimidated by the legend).

With that said, golang is too opinionated for its level of adoption, too out-of-touch with emerging consensus (and I’m being generous with “emerging” here, the Either monad is more than an emerging consensus around the right default for error handling), and too insular a leadership to be, in my personal opinion, a key contender outside some narrow niches.

I’m aware that there are avid advocates for golang on HN, and that I’m liable to upset some of them by saying so, so I’m going to use some examples to illustrate my point and to illustrate that I’ve done my homework before being critical.

Many, including myself, became aware of what is now called golang via this presentation at Google in 2007 (https://youtu.be/hB05UFqOtFA) introducing Newsqueak, a language Pike was pushing back in the mid-90s with what seems to be limited enthusiasm no greater than the enthusiasm for its predecessor Squeak. Any golang hacker will immediately recognize the language taking shape on the slides.

I’ve been dabbling with golang for something like a decade now, because I really want to like it. But like a lot of the late labs stuff it seems to have suffered from the dangerous combination of the implications of Richard Gabriel’s Worse is Better observation: it was simpler, faster, cheaper, and ultimately more successful to incrementally adapt innovations from Plan9 into Linux (and other Unices), to adapt innovations from sam and acme into nvim/emacs (and now VSCode), and to adapt channel-based and other principled concurrency from Newsqueak/golang (not to mention Erlang and other more full-throated endorsements of that region of the design space) into now countless other languages ranging from things like TypeScript and Rust at the high end of adoption all the way to things like Haskell at more moderate levels of adoption. Ironically enough, the success of UTF-8 (a compromise for the non-ASCII world but the compromise that made it happen at all) is this same principle in action via the same folks!

And golang would be fine as yet another interesting language serving as a testbed for more pragmatic applications of radical ideas: but it’s got corporate sponsorship that puts Sun Microsystems and Java to shame in scale and scope, but done quietly enough to not set off the same alarm bells.

The best example of this is probably this GitHub issue: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/19991 (though there are countless like it). I’ve worked with Tony Arcieri, he’s brilliant and humble and hard-working and while we haven’t kept in touch, I keep an eye out, and he’s clearly passionate about the success of golang. But proposal after proposal for some variation of the Either monad has died on procedural grounds for nearly a decade, all while being about the only thing that everyone else agrees on in modern industrial PLT: TypeScript supports it, Rust supports it, C++ de-facto supports it via things like abseil and folly, and of course the hard-core functional community never even bothered with something worse in the modern era. You can even kind of do it, but there are intentional limitations in the way generics get handled across compilation units to ensure it never gets adopted as a community-driven initiative. Try if you don’t believe me (my golang code has a Result type via emacs lisp I wrote).

Another example is the really weird compilation chain: countless serious people have weighed in here, I’ll elide all the classics because most people making these arguments have their own favorite language and they’ve all been on HN dozens of times, but a custom assembly language is a weird thing to have done, almost no one outside the hardcore golang community thinks it’s sane, the problems is creates for build systems and FFI and just everything about actually running the stuff are completely unnecessary: there are other IRs, not all of them are LLVM IR if you’ve got some beef with LLVM IR, and given that go doesn’t seriously target FFI as more than a weird black sheep (cgo) there’s, ya know, assembly language. It’s a parting shot from the Plan9 diehards with the industrial clout to make it stick.

The garbage collection story is getting better but it’s an acknowledged handicap in a MxN threading model context, it’s not a secret or controversial even among the maintainers. See the famous “Two Knobs” talk.

Raw pointers, sum types, dependency management, build, generics that never get there, FFI: solved problem after solved problem killed by pocket veto, explained away, minimized, all with mega-bucks, quiet as a gopher corporate sponsorship fighting a Cold War against Sun and the JVM that doesn’t exist anymore marketed by appealing to the worst instincts of otherwise unimpeachable luminaries of computing.

There is great software written in golang by engineers I aspire to as role models (TailScale and Brad respectively as maybe the best example). I had to get serious about learning golang and how to work around its ideologically-motivated own-goals because I got serious about WebRTC and Pion (another great piece of software). But it sucks. I dread working on that part of the stack.

Go enums do suck, but that’s because we pay a very heavy price for golang being mainstream at all: we’ve thrown away ZooKeeper and engineer-millennia of garbage-collector work and countless other treasures, it sucks oxygen out of the room on more plausible C successors like D and Jai and Nim and Zig and V and (it pains me to admit but it’s true) Rust.

Yes there is great software in golang, tons of it. Yes there are iconic legends who are passionate about it, yes it brought new stuff to the party and the mainstream.

But the cost was too high.

It seems to be userspace accessible: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/66450

Something you should keep in mind regarding maps in Go. They don't shrink after elements are deleted runtime: shrink map as elements are deleted #20135