Ask HN: Is Go simplicity worth it?

3 points by capl 2 years ago | 20 comments

This is clearly a subjective matter, so I'm asking for your opinion on the topic if you have one.

For high level programming, is the value of simplicity really that important, realistically? I'm talking about manifestos like the [grug brained developer](https://grugbrain.dev/) and [harmful.cat-v.org](http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/java) where most rants point at Go as a better alternative. From my personal experience, Go is very nice to develop in exactly because of the focus on simplicity, but I'm struggling to find a realistic use for Go. Want to build a web-stack? Modern tools like Next.js, web workers, supabase etc. makes this process very easy, even though you have to write JS/TS which does not value simplicity as highly. New tech like Blazor and LiveWire lets you ditch the API pattern altogether when all you want to ship is a website. These techniques can reduce complexity in terms of how much code you need to write and maintain by ditching the frontend-backend bridge, but might introduce more complexity overall by having to use, say, C# for Blazor which is ever-growing with complexity and over-engineering. So, is it worth still sticking to Go and go with the good old fashion backend API + frontend pattern in your opinion?

When it comes to low level programming and simplicity, I struggle to find use cases for Go since we are often looking for real-time and highest performance (which Go compiler prefers speed over optimization). However, I think I'm starting to prefer C over Rust after writing a little C and previously a lot more Rust. Because I simply don't see the benefit of kinda-but-not-really-guaranteed safety with a lot of added complexity and cognitive load over the simplicity of Go or C for general purpose development. I.e. development where safety isn't a priority, because then I think Ada would be a better fit with stronger safety guarantees, no?

And sorry if it's controversial. I'm not looking to start a flame war, but I'm genuinely interested in learning different opinions on the matter.

devjab 2 years ago |

Lunar went through a transition from Node/Typescript, to Java to Go and they seem to think it’s the “only” language worth building a back-end in. Which is obviously a wild statement, but having worked with C# and .Net as well as C++ for the past decade and now slowly moving into Node/Typescript I can sort of see why you would want to leave some of the “legacy” technologies like Java or C# behind.

Not because they aren’t excellent, but because they aren’t great to work with. C# and .Net has never been greater than they are now, and yet we increased our productivity by switching to Node/Typescript by around 20%, with the added benefit of having a single language across the stack. The latter was the primary reason for the switch and the increase in productivity came as a sort of surprise and we’re honestly still trying to figure out why our developers produce things which are measurably better at a faster pace with TS and for many a change of tech from something they’ve used for many years. I see some similar reflections and stories coming from the lunar team on why they switched from Java to Go.

That being said. Whatever works is always the best technology. If that’s C, C#, PHP or whatever, then that’s always going to be your best answer. I don’t think there is really any reason to “pick” the right technology from the get go, you can always worry about that when/if it becomes a problem. We didn’t switch to TS from C# because we disliked it, we did it to share our resources better. Eventually if/when we grow enough, we’re likely going to have to change things. Though maybe not. Lego seems to be doing fine on mainly Node and I doubt will reach their size any time soon.

capl 2 years ago | |

Do you think that the 20% productivity boost might be solely because you now just have one language to work with? That's what I'm thinking, and that's why I'm personally keen to learn and use Blazor instead of the usual JS frontend.

After looking around at the current popular solutions, I've yet to find something that is as ergonomic and productive as the .NET stack in regards to creating a web-based product. You have one of the most solid backend frameworks (ASP.NET) with lots of great tools like EF Core for ORM, SignalR for real-time, now Blazor for frontend, easy authentication and authorization, etc. That just makes everything so performant.

However, that is a very high level focused development path, while I feel Go is slightly lower level where you still have pointers and such. I see it as great for CLI apps and very specific server needs where you'd want great performance and CSP threading in combination with a very easy syntax for new developers, but I don't think that's a very common use case to be honest. Even though I love Go for its focus on simplicity, it just isn't the most suitable lang for high-level work, nor is it very suitable for low-level work at the same time.

Regarding your switch from C# to TS, I understand it made sense in the last couple of years. It simplified the stack via reducing language context switching, which can be a good productivity boost depending on your team and team size. However, if you would've tested Blazor today and found it would have satisfied your frontend needs, I actually think a full C# stack will be better than TypeScript to be honest, due to the better tooling and better runtime that exists for C# compared to Node.js/Bun/Deno. I still think TS is better in the frontend department than Blazor, but that's simply because JS/TS has been the only language for frontend in a long time. I hope Blazor will gain traction as a real alternative.

devjab 2 years ago | | |

If Blazor turns out to be good, we may reconsider. Like I said, I’ve worked with C# for a decade and I’m not personally convinced Blazor will even exist as a non-abandoned option in a couple of years. To be fair, I’m more convinced post .Net 8 than before, but it’s still Microsoft and their changing ways. As far as using it goes, we’ve done a few proof of concepts and found it extremely inferior to React, but it’s hardly a fair comparison given its age and lack of real adoption.

The productivity gains come somewhat in spite of using a single language and sharing resources. On one had this will play out nicely over time, but on the other hand we had to transition a lot of developers and tax others to help the process along. I can’t tell you exactly why we’re seeing it. The general consensus is that it’s just “nicer to work with Typescript” but I suspect it’s also because our internal developer tools are just better for Typescript. Not so much because we couldn’t have made them for C# but because we, had, to make them for Typescript.

neonsunset 2 years ago | |

Switching from C# to TS (especially in combination with Node which is much, much slower and has ecosystem known for vulnerabilities) is the most bizarre (if true at all) choice I have ever seen in the industry.

devjab 2 years ago | | |

It’s not like Nuget hasn’t had its share of supplychain attacks. I don’t disagree with you, but we don’t use external packages unless we have too (as in React) and we vet every update. So in that sense there is really no security issues compared to any other language we use.

As far as performance goes, all our heavy computation happens in C++ and for everything else the performance difference between the .Net vm and Node is negligible at our scale.

You may think it’s odd, but we’re hardly the only organisation doing it. Lego did it a few years back to great success.

bediger4000 2 years ago |

I think you've defined the use case for Go away. Without more context, you seem to be taking use cases where you only have business logic in web apps as a consideration.

There's lots of other places where a developer might want something that's quite fast, but doesn't drag along a lot of dependencies. Any microservice system debugging or performance analysis might fall in that category. Incident response for kubernetes or even data center racks of servers might, too.

A lot of microservices that are horizontally scaled would fit that, too. You don't want huge containers with detailed configurations, because that's hard to get correct, slow to load and probably has a lot of attack surface. A minimal container would make it harder for an attacker to use access to gain further access. Sprawling Java apps are the opposite of that.

capl 2 years ago | |

Good point! I want to enjoy Go, but I haven't really found the places for it... I usually come back to C# and C++ for high level and lower level problems after exploring and using modern/hyped alternatives like Go and Rust for a while. They might not be cool or idealistic, but they are very pragmatic.

dasmascusstuui 2 years ago |

It’s never worth it to use anything other than Python. It’s just reached a point where even very complex problems are easy to “fix” in Python then “learn” in another language. I believe in 15 years all major companies will use it exclusively for web development.

capl 2 years ago | |

Interesting take! Although, writing client sided code is not really suited at all in Python due to the horrendous performance. That can be accepted when we're waiting for IO anyways behind a server, or when a new developer is learning to program, but apart from that, it's not really optimal at all.

dasmascusstuui 2 years ago | | |

I’ve found the performance to be good. If you ever see slow client side performance there’s never an excuse for that in any language. JavaScript community are just bad programmers who add bloat to things unnecessarily. Anyone who’s actually benchmarked Python in the browser with real applications knows it’s impossible to see any actual difference in performance.

destevil 2 years ago |

for large systems, you really can't beat the implicit infra that Java and .NET bring to the table. I am dealing with 20 year old VB code that interops with new .NET core code just fine. Try saying the same for Python.

The larger issue with Go, which Go enthusiasts will downvote me for, is that it allows for writing absolutely garbage code that is impossible to read. Readibility is king in software development, and developers spend 80% time reading it. I won't go into the details here, but Go has no constraints for how code should be structured, leading to spaghetti code. I have first hand experience, and 30 years professional experience.

capl 2 years ago | |

Good point regarding .NET! The .NET CLR / VM is clever in that way.

Regarding your experience with readability in Go, I have to agree in some way because the known (and controversial) explicit error handling, but what you may realize sooner or later is that handling both the happy path and erroneous path is actually a net positive. That's the difference between seeing `if err != nil {` as code pollution or actual logic. I've realized the latter.

destevil 2 years ago | | |

This older reply is pretty exhaustive. Go leaves critical readability structuring to devs (a bad idea).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38128698

jjgreen 2 years ago |

Responses to a "Why Go" question I asked a couple of weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38126816

capl 2 years ago | |

thanks I'll have a look through that thread

PaulHoule 2 years ago |

What’s wrong with Java and the JVM really, particularly when Java has concise lambdas, pattern matching, virtual threads not to mention real threads that really work?

capl 2 years ago | |

Well for starters, getting hold of a modern JDK seemed to be impossible the last time I tried (which was a couple of years ago on Windows). If I took the risk of downloading from the shady website that looked like it was last updated in 2005, I could get hold of Java 8 if Oracle was so generous as to let me download that for free .

And then the language itself forces class based programming (which isn't really OOP), which I heavily dislike due to it only over-complicating things in the long run. C# provides largely the same, but MS is actually way more open than Oracle as in it's easy to get documentation and the dev environment set up, and they provide newer and more modern features than Java. Which is surprising given it's Microsoft and their fetish for providing counter-intuitive and user-unfriendly products. When it comes to the JVM / .NET CLR, the only place I find it acceptable is on the server side IMO. The downgrade in performance (which means higher resource usage) side is not worth the "everything is an object" vision for me, at all. Not even close. Client side devices often run on battery power, so that has real consequences there.

So that's why I'm personally not the biggest Java fan. In fact, if anything on harmful.cat-v.org is true, it's "Java is write once, run away" for me... sorry. If only Oracle could provide the same user-friendliness that Microsoft is showing with .NET, ditch class-based programming (which means rewrite the entire language, not very realistic) then maybe it could be interesting, but most likely not better than Go or Node.js, in my experience anyways.

And by the way, what do you mean by threads that really work? It's cool that Java gives you the power of having system threads and green threads in the same environment, but when is that realistically needed? Only time I can think of is writing client-sided code where you want performance to be highly optimized and not wanting to waste time on organizing a new green-thread, but as I've mentioned I believe Java on the client side is nothing but a sin.