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by stcredzero
2544 days ago
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actual compiler enforced error handling like Rust Or Java? Compare (again) with Rust, or with languages with proper immutable data structures like Scala and Java To paraphrase you from earlier: As far as I know, race conditions happen and leak out into production with Scala and Java. The lesson of golang, and really the lesson of programming in the large for the past 30 years, is that it's not enough to have mathematical or methodological power in guaranteeing correctness in a program. If that were the case, formal methods would have won decades ago, and we'd all be using such environments. It's not about having the most rigorous widget. It's getting programmers to do the right thing, month after month, year after year, in large numbers, across different management teams. Arguing the strength of constructs within programming languages is just an idle meta-anatomic measurement exercise. That said, I like lots of things about Java, Scala, and Rust. I just happen to really like golang for a different set of reasons. Golang is concurrency+programming-in-the-large-human-factors "Blub," in a way that refutes PG's essay about Blub. |
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Yes - that was implied in the same sentence where I wrote "(e.g. exceptions or actual compiler enforced error handling like Rust)." :-)
> As far as I know, race conditions happen and leak out into production with Scala and Java.
They do. But there are more techniques in those languages (such as immutable collections, as their type systems are actually able to model and implement them) to mitigate the issue.
> and really the lesson of programming in the large for the past 30 years, is that it's not enough to have mathematical or methodological power in guaranteeing correctness in a program.
I agree there. I actually don't abide by the ideas that using a language like Haskell or Idris or what have you will automagically grant you superior or error-free software. I actually like what talks like these have to say:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWdy_AngDp0
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=449j7oKQVkc
However, that does not mean we disregard established practices, only to try to reinvent them in a bad way as we see golang trying to do (no generics - even though many other languages implemented them "correctly", bad error handling, no sum types, null pointers, and so on). They purposely disregarded these works without good arguments at all, and now they're struggling to find workarounds, or continue to dismiss them as non-issues, even though they clearly are.
The way I see it, the moment Java gets fibers and value types implemented, and GraalVM's native compilation is mature enough for use, golang's appeal as a devops langauge where it ended up (however low it is currently - as it's mainly over hyped) becomes even less. C#/.NET is the other alternative making very good progress, and they already have async, value types, and NGEN (though I don't know how mature the latter is for production).
> programming-in-the-large-human-factors
This seems to continually get mentioned without anything to back it up. Sorry, but from what I've seen, Java and C# are strictly superior for "programming in the large". Things like "fast compile times" aren't even a factor in front of Java and C# with their incremental compilation. And the fact that the language is "simple" just means that you will end up with more verbose and complex code, with more places for things to go wrong, and yes I've seen it in larger golang code bases.