September 9th, 2024

A Love Letter to Go

The author reflects on 12 years with Go, praising its simplicity, performance, and concurrency, while suggesting improvements in data structure handling and broader use in data science and machine learning.

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A Love Letter to Go

The article reflects on the author's 12-year journey with the Go programming language, highlighting its strengths and areas for improvement. Initially adopted to address scaling issues in a codebase, Go's performance, simplicity, and concurrency features made it a suitable choice over other languages like C++, Java, and Scala. The author appreciates Go's straightforward syntax, minimal keywords, and robust standard library, which facilitates modern software development without excessive dependencies. The language's error handling, while often criticized for its verbosity, is praised for its explicitness and compatibility with test-driven development. Go's concurrency model is recognized as a significant advantage, allowing developers to build efficient systems easily. Despite the author's current focus on TypeScript, they express a renewed appreciation for Go's design principles. Areas for potential improvement include data structure handling and broader adoption in data science and machine learning. Overall, the author views Go as a practical, evolving language that effectively meets various programming needs.

- The author has been using Go for 12 years, initially to solve scaling issues in a codebase.

- Go is praised for its simplicity, performance, and powerful concurrency model.

- The standard library is highlighted as a key feature that supports modern software development.

- Error handling in Go is seen as explicit and beneficial for test-driven development.

- The author suggests improvements in data structure handling and greater adoption in data science.

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By @johnisgood - 2 months
Have you tried Elixir? I see mention of other programming languages but when it comes to distributed programming or scalability, Elixir (or Erlang, but you may not like the syntax) is suitable.

When it comes to projects requiring scalability, to me, Go is for smaller or toy projects, Elixir is for more serious ones. That said, I have written some more serious stuff in Go. I like the language, too. I can get really productive in it easily.