The Best Feature of Go
I’ve been programming since the late 90’s and I’ve done quite a bit of coding in C, C++, a lot of it in PHP and some in Python as well. On the front-end I’ve done some JavaScript and I’ve also had the misfortune of programming in Java 😉
I started programming in Go in 2012 and since then I haven’t wanted to program in any other language. I’ve had a handful of large Go implementations across two companies and by now I have my own short list of favourite features.
Inheritance Semantics in Go
Contemporary application design discipline is deeply rooted in Object Oriented Analysis and Design and inheritance is a key concept in OOAD. Go does not support classes and inheritance in their classic OOP sense but since many of us are trained in OOP, the loss of an important design concept sometimes feels restrictive.
Even though I knew about embedding and interfaces, their connection with classic inheritance wasn’t quite obvious. I set out to understand how I could emulate the coarse inheritance semantics in Go, without going into fine nuances. That in turn has helped me understand embedding and interfaces in a deeper way and I hope it would help me better design Go types and methods for extensibility.
The Compiler as a Refactoring Aid
Recently, I sat down to refactor a Go application with a high-level design objective in place. The application had two conceptually separate entities implemented in different files but mashed into a single package. I needed to separate them out into their own packages. I wasn’t using an IDE — just Emacs with basic formatting and non-contextual auto-complete aids.
I started out by creating a new directory for the package to be split out and moved the files that contained most of the relevant code into that directory, without thinking of the consequences. I could just invoke the compiler and let it guide me through the process of fitting the pieces of the puzzle together. One of the nice features of modern compilers is that they don’t continue dumping out errors beyond a limit. This allows fixing a program in small steps, going by the changes in errors produced by the compilers.
Go Workshop
Last week, I conducted a 2 day Go Workshop at my workplace. It was fun.
I started day 1 with the excellent Go at Google presentation by Rob Pike, followed by my own presentation of Go’s key features. The rest of Day 1 was spent taking the Go Tour.
The coolest thing I did was on day 2. I mirrored my laptop on the projector and went through a fresh install of Go from source on my [newly allocated] dev box. Everyone else had identical dev environments so they could follow what I was doing on-screen. At the end of it everyone had a functional Go workspace!
Why I Program in Go
Go is a fresh new programming language, that has come out of Google and is primarily targeted towards server development. It is developed by some very accomplished computer scientists, like Ken Thompson and Rob Pike. I recently launched a significant new product built with Go at work, and it has proved itself out very well in terms of developer productivity and performance. So much so that many other teams are also giving it a go (oh, how punny this language’s name is).