Much of go’s “simplicity” is a Faustian bargain that comes at the cost of unnecessary complexity in each and every project that winds up being written with it.
I mean, generics are kind of go's whipping boy. Lacking generics means you end up with copy/pasted code for utility functions that should be part of the go stdlib in virtually every project. It also means copy/pasted code for any data structure you might want to use that's fancier than an array.
Go's "simplicity" of error handling (read: lack of any actual error handling abstractions) means you don't get useful things like stack traces and have to manually grep through code for nested error messages. It also makes go code difficult to read at a glance, since virtually every statement winds up wrapped in repetitive error-handling code that doubles or even triples the amount of code in the happy path.
The error-handling pattern of using tuples, but no syntactical ability to operate on data within a tuple means you almost never have the ability to chain function calls like `a.b().c().d()`. Instead you have to manually unwrap the value and error, return if there's an error, call the next function, manually unwrap the value and error, ad nauseam. The "idiom" of gift-wrapping error messages is absurd — you are replacing machine-based exception handlers with expensive, slow, error-prone, and less-capable meat-based exception handlers.
Having a half-baked type system means you end up having to frequently write type-switches which are checked at runtime to do any sort of generic code. There's no functionality in the language to ensure that all possible options for that type switch are exhausted, so you are virtually guaranteed to get runtime bugs when a new type gets written and later is passed in.
Speaking of type switches, they interact poorly with go's indefensible decision to have interfaces implemented implicitly rather than explicitly. I have seen types get matched to the wrong typeswitch in producion code because a new method implemented on one type caused it to accidentally "implement" an interface used elsewhere in a typeswitch. Good luck ever catching this before it hits you in production.
Go's concurrency primitives are useful, but the lack of ability to abstract over them means that you have "advanced go concurrency patterns" dozens of lines long and involving multiple synchronization primitives for what amounts to `a | b | c` (https://gist.github.com/kachayev/21e7fe149bc5ae0bd878). God help you if you want to implement something like parallel map. God help you if you want to implement something like parallel map for n > 1 types.
Go requires you to manually remember to release resources you've acquired with `defer`, instead of sanely having There is no capacity in the language to enforce that you've done so, and it is virtually impossible to find e.g., a missing `defer fd.Close()` in a large code base. God help you if you leak file descriptors and need to track down the source.
Go's inability to perform any meaningful abstractions also means that you have to know all the details of code you import. It's difficult to make code a black box. Case in point: to do something as painfully simple as reading a file, you need to import bufio, io, io/util, and os.
During the course of writing this post, I forgot more examples than I listed — I literally could not remember them all in my head as I was writing them down. This isn't simplicity, this is utter madness.
> you end up having to frequently write type-switches which are checked at runtime to do any sort of generic code.
This baffles me. I think I basically never use any type-switches, with the exception of interfaces being used as a sum-type - in which case the problems you mention with type-switches just don't come up.
> Case in point: to do something as painfully simple as reading a file, you need to import bufio, io, io/util, and os.
I don't know what you mean here. `ioutil.ReadFile` reads the whole file, done. Even if you prefer linewise-scanning, you still only need `bufio` and `os`.
But even if you'd need all those packages to read a file: So what? Like, I honestly don't understand what's the problem with that.
The problem with that is I have to care how `file` works.
Here's how to read a whole file then loop over the lines:
file, err := ioutil.ReadFile("data.txt")
// some error handling
for _, line := range strings.Split(file, "\n") {
fmt.Println(line)
}
Here's how to stream a file one line at a time:
file, err := os.Open("data.txt")
// some error handling
defer file.Close()
scanner := bufio.NewScanner(file)
for scanner.Scan() {
fmt.Println(scanner.Text())
}
if err := scanner.Err(); err != nil {
// more error handling
}
Here's how I, at least, would like it to work:
fileContents := file.Read("data.txt")
for _, line := range fileContents {
fmt.Println(line)
}
if fileContents.Err() {
// some error handling
}
fileContents := file.ReadStreaming("data.txt")
for _, line := range fileContents {
fmt.Println(line)
}
if fileContents.Err() {
// some error handling
}
The critical point is that I don't want to care whether `file` is a byte slice or a byte buffer, and Go doesn't let me not care. I want to be able to write code that deals with "enumerable data of some sort", once, and then works no matter how the caller decides to provide that data.
Go (intentionally) makes it exceedingly difficult to obscure how a piece of code works from the rest of the codebase, and I personally think that's a fatally poor design decision. In my experience, it makes it difficult to decouple modules since code often has to be at least somewhat aware of quite a few implementation details of a library in order to use it correctly. It makes it really difficult to build higher level abstractions that don't leak. I have a much harder time in Go getting away from thinking in `int`s and `floats` and staying terms of the domain objects that I actually do care about.
"How" a piece of code functions is at best the third, and probably only the fourth most important question (behind "why", "what", and probably "when" if you use any concurrency at all), but Go forces it to be front and center at all times.
I still don't get what your problem is. It seems what you want is to just take an io.Reader and pass that to bufio.NewScanner, solving your problem and letting your caller figure out what Reader to pass you? I mean, to me, this seems to be a solved problem and exactly one of Go's major strengths.
> it makes it difficult to decouple modules since code often has to be at least somewhat aware of quite a few implementation details of a library in order to use it correctly.
You still haven't described a single piece of your code that requires, in any way to know any implementation details of any of the libraries you are using. Like, you don't have to care how os.File is implemented, it just gives you a Read method that you can use to read from it, just like a thousand other Readers. And then you can use that in a bufio.Scanner to read lines (words, whatever tokens), without that having to care in any way about how the Read method is implemented. You want to scan lines from a byte-slice, use bytes.Reader, that's it's sole purpose and your scanning code does not have to care what Reader it gets passed.
Like, I seriously don't understand your problem here. It would seem to me, what you are describing is exactly how Go works.
> "How" a piece of code functions is at best the third, and probably only the fourth most important question (behind "why", "what", and probably "when" if you use any concurrency at all), but Go forces it to be front and center at all times.
Sure, I agree that Go does not encourage you to build deep abstractions. But I fundamentally disagree that you have to know any implementation details - anymore than any other language. Yeah, the type system doesn't lend itself to build extra abstractions, but "having to care about implementation details" just is not one of the symptoms of that o.O
> You still haven't described a single piece of your code that requires, in any way to know any implementation details of any of the libraries you are using. Like, you don't have to care how os.File is implemented, it just gives you a Read method that you can use to read from it, just like a thousand other Readers. And then you can use that in a bufio.Scanner to read lines (words, whatever tokens), without that having to care in any way about how the Read method is implemented. You want to scan lines from a byte-slice, use bytes.Reader, that's it's sole purpose and your scanning code does not have to care what Reader it gets passed.
These are literally implementation details. Except you're having to implement them yourself. Reading a file delimited by tokens is a solved problem. There is zero reason why I should be having string together code from four different modules to accomplish this myself. This is the entire reason we have come up with the concept of abstraction.
> Except you're having to implement them yourself.
This is plainly wrong. All components I mentioned exist in the stdlib.
You have to glue them together yourself, sure, but that's the point of having components with separated concerns, which is usually considered a good thing in software engineering.
> There is zero reason why I should be having string together code from four different modules to accomplish this myself.
You don't. You have to use at most 2. And also, to repeat the question: who cares? Like, what is the actual downside of having to import 2 packages? I also took the liberty of looking for solutions to how to do this in other languages. Here is a Java solution, which is in line with what's requested that has 4 imports and one of them is third-party: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1096859. Here's rust code with 4 imports: https://users.rust-lang.org/t/read-a-file-line-by-line/1585. Python and Haskell get away without imports; because they just make reading files a language-builtin/part of the prelude, which TBQH is pretty cheaty.
Like, even if I'd buy into the notion that modularity and composability are bad things, it's not even as if Go would be in any way an outlier here. And even if it where then at best this is the mild complaint that no one has yet wrapped this in a ~10-line library; the language certainly does allow it, contrary to what's claimed.
I'm sorry, but this complaint is just forcibly trying to make up a problem where none exist to fit your narrative of Go being a bad language. It's not productive.
In this case, I suppose my specific complaint is that I'm unable to make `range` work transparently with an arbitrary type.
I guess you could chalk it up to a difference of aesthetic opinion. I don't want to think about buffers or readables. I want to think about loops and strings. Looping over a collection means `for range`, so I'm gonna assume that Just Works. Maybe `for range` is just syntactic sugar for `bufio.Scanner` under the hood, but I don't want to care while I'm using it.
I want to think of a file as a black box full of strings. What's actually in the box? Don't care. How do I get lines out of the box? `for _, str := range blackBox`, same way I loop over every collection. How does that actually work? Don't care. Whoever implemented the box has to care, of course, but I sure shouldn't. I've got more important things to worry about, like whatever it is I actually want the code to do. Every character that isn't about whatever it is I actually want the code to do is a problem.
Having primitives and builtins that only work sometimes (specifically, with a short list of builtin types and aliases for same) means I can't just use the builtins without thinking about what I'm using them on. Having to crush down to a lowest common denominator means that what's in my brain while I'm reading and writing code isn't strings and what I actually aim to do with them, it's how the Reader API works, and whether I read a full or a partial line, and whether I need to handle errors before or in or after the loop this time. I want to think about my problem domain, but Go keeps dragging me down into the weeds.
> In this case, I suppose my specific complaint is that I'm unable to make `range` work transparently with an arbitrary type.
Sure, fair enough. But note that you've now shifted the criticism from "I have to import 4 packages" (which was wrong) over "I need to know implementation details of packages" (which was wrong) to "I don't like that Go doesn't have operator overloading".
> I want to think of a file as a black box full of strings.
And what exactly is preventing you from doing that? Like, how exactly is the language preventing anyone from providing this much higher level API? You could even make it work with range, if you so desire (it would be considered very unidiomatic, but presumably you don't care).
The stdlib provides you with composable pieces to achieve the job you want. I still find this complaint incredibly weird, unless you assume that everyone wants to view files as just a bunch of lines (I'd argue, these days, the overwhelming majority of files probably aren't). Like, you will still need the lower-level API; where's the problem with having an stdlib which focuses on providing composable pieces and then having some library do the composition for higher-level concerns?
Last time I checked, having small composable units of code with clearly separated concerns was pretty much universally considered a good thing.
> it's how the Reader API works, and whether I read a full or a partial line
This is just a random aside, but: You never have to care about that, unless you specifically want to. But I would argue that code that calls io.Reader.Read is likely wrong - unless it does so to wrap it. Use io.ReadFull.
Go can offer simplicity and flexibility only once you use function literals. Like reading a file line by line could be just a single function call that calls your function literal each time the line is read.
Yes, thank you! This is the point I was trying to get across. In a sense, Go makes all abstractions shallow. Perhaps worse, Go makes all abstractions several times leakier than they need to be. While this is apparently something the "all code must be explicit" crowd seems to love, to me it means I can't just focus on the high-level business problem I'm trying to solve. Instead I have to get bogged down in the nitty gritty details of everything.
You forgot the part where, for the sake of simplicity, their stdlib directly invokes syscalls (rather than going through libc). Which breaks on platforms where syscalls are not considered a stable API, like the BSDs and macOS:
Doesn't forcing your self into a corner where you have to either depend on unstable system interfaces or suffer severe performance penalties indicate poor design?
Obviously any set of abstractions is going to wind up making tradeoffs, and choices that make one particular set of problems easy can cause negative consequences in other areas. Just the more that I used go, the more I grew to question the logic behind these design decisions. Perhaps they make sense at Google, but to me they don't seem to make sense outside of its internally-controlled confines.
It really sounds like you might like Rust. Have you looked into it?
/snark
But seriously, for a long time before Rust was fully baked, I kept wishing it would be done, so that people hating on Go could go use Rust instead. Now it's fully baked, which is awesome.
Rust is an example of a phenomenally well-designed language.
When I first started go, I was incredibly excited to start learning it. From everything I'd heard, it was everything I was hoping to find in a language. The more I started using it, the more and more its poor design decisions and the hollow defenses of these decisions by its community started to grate on me.
Rust, on the other hand, I was loathing learning. I'd already just learned go and was extremely disappointed with it. I really didn't want to learn something else in this language space that I assumed overlapped so much, and I really entered into it hesitatingly. But I am exceedingly glad I did — unlike with go, every day I used Rust I came to appreciate its design more and more. Features of the language seem to have been designed to coordinate and work with one-another, instead of all being bolted on separately without regard to how they'd interact.
On top of that, Rust has some of the most friendly, dedicated, and talented developer community I've ever seen.
Aside from the occasional partially misquoted and much-publicized opinionated statement from Go Team members, Go also has some of the most friendly, dedicated, and talented developer community I've ever seen.
I'm more than fine with people preferring Rust. I'm fine with Go's choices rubbing people the wrong way. But the frequent caricature of the Go Team being condescending or clueless simply rings false to anyone who has enjoyed being part of the Go community, where kindness and ability abound.
I'm always curious about the frequent ravings about how friendly the Rust community is. I'm super glad, and I love seeing (hearing) the reports from the Increasing Rust's Reach program on the New Rustacean podcast, for example. I'm glad Rust is so welcoming and friendly.
But I guess for this (increasingly) greybeard, it's funny, because the whole thing seems so cyclical: the Ruby community back in the PragProg-induced-popularity days, and the Perl community back in the pre-Perl6 days had a similarly lovely feel (minus the more recent but oh-so-welcome proactive diversity bent).
Anyways, enough ramblings. I'm glad Rust fits so well for you. I keep meaning to learn it properly by porting an Apple II emulator or something, but… time :-)
Thanks for writing this up; it was something of a wake-up call from a recent bout of fanboyism, and I found myself agreeing with most of your examples. I'm still learning and I haven't found any of these things to be dealbreakers yet, but they're absolutely questionable design decisions when you consider that other languages already solved many of these issues (with good reason). I think there's a lot to like about Go but I'm worried that the language will die young because of religious inertia.
That's the trap of Go. None of these are deal breakers. Yet.
It's notable that the vast majority of the above are complaints by experienced developers working on large projects that need to be maintained and expanded for years. They're not the sort of thing you notice over a weekend of tinkering on something fun, and they're not the sort of issues that beginners will run into under any normal circumstances.
All of that adds up to a honeypot for newcomers. The language has some deep issues, but they're not the kind of things you're likely to notice until you already have 200k lines written and it's too late to switch to something with a steeper learning curve. Saving two weeks of confusion when you're learning ends up causing a lifetime of headaches down the road once you're an expert.
In other words, Go is PHP for systems programmers.
I hate this kind of "if only you'd write large programs and not just toys, you'd understand how bad Go is".
I write Go at work. I haven't counted in a while, but I guess the code of my team comprises significantly more than 200k lines (and that doesn't even count all the code I'm working on that isn't from my immediate team).
IMO, the more LOC you have, the more the design of Go becomes a godsend. Because it becomes much easier to dive into code you haven't written yourself.
But anyway, that's just my opinion, I just wish that people would stop this "anyone who disagrees with me just doesn't have the correct set of experiences" FUD.
I wouldn't call it madness, just limits Go usage somewhat, especially in domains involving a lot of concurrency.
I once had hopes for Go. But the team working on it decided not to fix any of its flaws that became obvious over time and even outright denied their existence. So, not much Go for me anymore, but I'm still looking forward to see what such approach can bring in Go 2.
This is the same mentality as people who throw up their hands and say government is broken, so we should deprive it of resources to make it as small as possible. Doing this just winds up makes the problem worse, when there’s plenty of evidence that well-funded governments can work well.
It’s also the same broken mentality behind schemaless databases. Schemas are hard, so let’s get rid of them. This backfires because you haven’t actually rid yourself of schemas, they’re just implicit and now you lack any tools to operate on them meaningfully.
“Hard problems are hard, so let’s just avoid dealing with them” is not a sustainable solution in the long term. Sometimes they’re really hard and ignoring them makes it worse. Sometimes they’re only hard because we haven’t thought about them in the right context. And sometimes hard problems can be sidestepped entirely with a bit of cleverness. But outright ignoring them and hoping they go away just punts the hard problems to others.
Much of go’s “simplicity” is a Faustian bargain that comes at the cost of unnecessary complexity in each and every project that winds up being written with it.