Comment by stackghost
1 day ago
Go is okay. I don't hate it but I certainly don't love it.
The packaging story is better than c++ or python but that's not saying much, the way it handles private repos is a colossal pain, and the fact that originally you had to have everything under one particular blessed directory and modules were an afterthought sure speaks volumes about the critical thinking (or lack thereof) that went into the design.
Also I miss being able to use exceptions.
When Go was new, having better package management than Python and C++ was saying a lot. I’m sure Go wasn’t the first, but there weren’t many mainstream languages that didn’t make you learn some imperative DSL just to add dependencies.
Sure, but all those languages didn't have the psychotic design that mandated all your code lives under $GOPATH for the first several versions.
I'm not saying it's awful, it's just a pretty mid language, is all.
That was a Plan9ism, I think. Java had something like it with CLASSPATH too, didn't it?
I never understood the GOPATH freakout, coming from Python it seemed really natural- it's a mandatory virtualenv.
1 reply →
I picked up Go precisely in 2012 because $GOPATH (as bad as it was) was infinitely better than CMake, Gradle, Autotools, pip, etc. It was dead simple to do basic dependency management and get an executable binary out. In any other mainstream language on offer at the time, you had to learn an entire programming language just to script your meta build system before you could even begin writing code, and that build system programming language was often more complex than Go.
The language has changed a lot since then. Give it a fresh look sometime.
1 reply →