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One year after switching from Java to Go

(glasskube.dev)
257 points pmig | 5 comments | 18 Feb 25 16:55 UTC | HN request time: 0.569s | source
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bryancoxwell ◴[18 Feb 25 23:29 UTC] No.43096481[source]▶
> But there are obviously work around solutions in the Go ecosystem. It uses the Context ctx, which we pass around functions in order to juggle data around in the application.

Man. This works. The context API allows/enables it. But I’d really recommend against passing data to functions via context. The biggest selling point of Go to me is that I can usually just look at anyone’s code and know what it’s doing, but this breaks down when data is hidden inside a context. Dependency injection is entirely possible without using the context package at all, interfaces are great for it.

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throwaway2037 ◴[19 Feb 25 03:17 UTC] No.43098179[source]▶

    > The biggest selling point of Go to me is that I can usually just look at anyone’s code and know what it’s doing
This is not possible in Java or C#? Both of those languages are so simple to grasp.
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1. lelanthran ◴[19 Feb 25 06:27 UTC] No.43099187[source]▶
> This is not possible in Java or C#? Both of those languages are so simple to grasp.

Not really, no.

Apart from the cognitive burden of knowing the test framework in use, the DI tooling in use, the Mocking framework in use, plus all the annotations that each framework may want/need, almost none of which applies to the Go projects I've seen, the languages themselves have drifted away from simplicity.

I used to program in C# but left it for a long time and only recently looked at it again. C# is approaching C++ levels of syntax indecipherability.

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2. zigzag312 ◴[19 Feb 25 08:32 UTC] No.43099933[source]▶
> C# is approaching C++ levels of syntax indecipherability.

Can you post an example of such new syntax? In my experience C#'s syntax is getting cleaner.

3. gf000 ◴[19 Feb 25 10:56 UTC] No.43100780[source]▶
C# tends to accumulate a lot of new features, but Java has a bog-standard syntax and even new features are very carefully added and easily guessable even if you haven't seen them before (e.g. switch expressions vs statements).

There is absolutely nothing more readable in Go than in Java, it's just classis familiarity (referencing the simple vs easy talk), I would even wager that too little expressivity will actively hinder code understanding.

(It's much easier to understand the intent of a complex stream API "pipe" than 4 nested for loops with ifs, with a bunch of dumb if errs pretending to be error handling).

Also, you are comparing a complex framework that solves 70% of your problem domain (at the price of a bit of a learning curve) with a vanilla Go project that only calls libraries. The exact same is more than possible with Java, it just doesn't make much sense in case of CRUD apps because better ways exist.

4. CharlieDigital ◴[19 Feb 25 12:27 UTC] No.43101322[source]▶
Kinda disagree on C#

It's actually converging with JS and TS

Small repo: https://github.com/CharlieDigital/js-ts-csharp

Edit: but I don't want to dismiss either because C# does cover a large gamut of use cases (desktop, 3D/gaming, COM interop, etc.) and it is true that in some use cases, you may see a wider range of keyword soup compared to just building web APIs (where I think it really shines; this is a .NET web API in 4 lines: https://imgur.com/a/simple-net-api-with-route-param-validati...).

5. spicyusername ◴[19 Feb 25 13:23 UTC] No.43101876[source]▶
Gotta disagree for C#.

It definitely has more language features than Go, but by no means is indecipherable.

I find C# syntax to be quite crisp.