Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by leighmcculloch 3593 days ago
+100 Go is super boring and that it's a selling point. Code is a tool, not a device for entertainment. I'm yet to meet a 20+year developer who is wowed by extensive/unique/complex features, which makes me think as I also mature as a developer I'm going to find those things less important.

However, the Go version is way easier to understand. Mind you, I have very little experience with Elixir. In the interest of being pragmatic, the easier code is to understand, the easier it will be to maintain, and we spend much more time maintaining code than writing it fresh.
2 comments
sheepmullet 3593 days ago
> Go is super boring and that it's a selling point. Code is a tool, not a device for entertainment.

It is a balancing act.

As an industry we don't "do" training on work time.

So how do you convince developers to work on learning and development during their own time?

One way is to make the language fun and interesting.

> I'm yet to meet a 20+year developer who is wowed by extensive/unique/complex features

20+ year devs don't like jumping onto the latest unproven technique/language. Don't mistake that for wanting few/limited features in a language.

20+year developers arent driving transitions to go. It is fairly new developers wanting to switch because it's cool, it's new, and it helps level the playing field by bringing experienced developers down a peg or two.

link
20yrs_no_equity 3593 days ago
Having a lot of experience in Elixir and Go I will say that the advantage of Elixir is not excitement, but that you can reason about your code and expect it to work. For years. Half assed go programs will crash. Half assed elixir programs can run for decades without maintenance.

Elixir is way easier to understand than Go. If you will put one week into learning it, you'll be a lot further than you are with go.

I have a couple decades of professional experience, if you are building a serious system, you want Elixir. IF you are building a devops tool, where a single binary with no install process is what's important, you want go.

But given all the containerization and distributed programming people are doing these days using go for that kinda shows to me that most engineering is done by people who don't understand distributed systems.

link