Learning to code is cool!

boing
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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/09/20/learning-to-code-is-cool.html

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Looked at Go, just to see what it was on about. Attended a talk on it once. Then saw this masochistic number on YC news:

Programmers can have a sick sense of humor sometimes.

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Not to mention inscrutable, at times.

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I want to like Go, because it has the whole compiling into native binaries thing going (with no need for runtime environments), but man… It feels like I have to use a 6’’ chef’s knife for the entire food prep process. It’s useful, yes, and you can get a lot of day-to-day bash++ work done, but it just feels inelegant compared to more specialized and dangerous tools. It’s a bad analogy. Let me start over.

I feel go chops off some of the more powerful idioms without really addressing the problems those idioms were designed to solve. Sure, it’s easy to get spun up in go, but I don’t think there’s a whole lot of difference between an experienced go developer and an intermediate go developer. Sure, you can’t cut your feet off as easily, but having to do things like list comprehension or trying not to write the same code more than twice gets really strange really quickly.

It’s basically if Rob Pike designed a language that feels like an evolution of C and Bash squashed together but while ignoring all other languages other than those two. (And apocryphally, I heard that Rob Pike wanted tabs over spaces and designed it to subtly give the finger to his employer’s spaces over tabs preference.)

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I bet there is. But that would ruin the gag. Go is supposed to be “safe” by design and a “simple gui app” ends up being about the most unsafe thing imaginable.

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You can pay what you want for the Learn to Code 2017 Bundle here.

Cool! Do you guys like lentils? Ginger? KangKong? How do I enter in the field what stuff I have surplus of? That’s the stuff I want to use as payment.

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Also, part of the gag is that the core go team seems very unconcerned about outside libraries (the 1.0 doesn’t have native dependency management!).

(Yes, I understand that the language comes from the Google paradigm of one git repo per company. Yes, one repository. For all of Google.)

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Don’t get me started on Chef’s Knife utility…

I prefer the flavor of Chocolately nuget.

You just can’t make this stuff up.

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