Go is kinda nice

Oct 3, 2024

Ever since I first heard about Go (before it even came out, I believe) I was very dismissive. It was a language for old crufty programmers who mainly wanted a slightly nicer C, ignoring all recent developments in language design. The future was in languages with super advanced compilers like Haskell. For people who couldn't handle Haskell there was always OCaml.

This was before I had any kind of software development job though, and since then I've been learning to appreciate the value of incremental changes as opposed to introducing a paradigm shift. Haskell and OCaml aren't much more popular than they were back in 2008 but a lot of ideas from functional programming and the Hindley-Miller type system have become more mainstream.

Go eschews even those developments but it's still doing fine. At least for the type of work that I tend to, which is mostly web servers. I might be missing some of the history here, but Go seems to have avoided the framework and library churn that I've observed throughout my career. Is it because a lot of the stuff you might need for a web server is already built-in, and most of it has been there from the start? But Python also has a lot built-in and it still went through a fair amount of churn. Maybe it's because people who are comfortable writing if (err != nil) { return nil, err } are also not the kind of people to pursue the new hotness all the time.

Anyway, I've been writing and reading some Go for work and it's been good. Interfaces are pretty nice. I don't know yet whether I prefer them to Rust's traits, but so far I like that they're implicit. Writing an HTTP server is a simple matter of implementing a ServeHTTP(http.ResponseWriter, *http.Request) method on a type. This will automatically make the type implement the Handler interface, meaning I can just pass it to http.ListenAndServe(). It's pretty sweet.