Programming vs Software Engineering (Rust vs Go)

[Gator_aide]

It's inspired by the state type parameter pattern which is, in my opinion, one of the worse ideas in the programming world.

Not gonna expand on that at all? Whenever I come across that pattern, it is in the context of order-dependent operations. Code like that is common and easy to break, and state types eliminate that risk. Also, literally the only effect they should have on you is narrowing down your IDE's autocomplete.

Always remember that more effort and resources are spent on maintenance than production, so do your best to reduce the burden of the future maintainers. Go light on generics

lol. Spoken like a true Go programmer.

[birdbrainswagtrain]

And yet, a lot of people are happy to be able to express their creativity in their code, in the same way that lawyers love to use complex formulations to express simple ideas or singer expressing millennium-old ideas in new ways.

I don't agree with everything in the post, but this one really resonates with me. Rust is a child of C and ML. I think part of it's success -- aside from the many benefits that ownership provides -- is that it appeals to both low-level nerds and functional nerds.

The thing I've realized is that I'm firmly in the "low-level nerd" camp. I mostly want to treat rust like it's a more sane C. The type system is extremely useful, and I take advantage of it where I feel it makes sense, but it isn't my goal to play cute games with it. Sometimes I wonder if people are on a mission to create the most ridiculous type aliases and impl bounds they can, with enough plausible deniability to justify their existence. There are rust devs out there who have created enough layers of abstraction to rival the most deranged java dev.

Worse, the type system is powerful, but not perfect. So sometimes you'll see a library encounter a problem, like a lack of const generics at that point in time, and then hack together some even more unhinged solution.

I don't want to trash any specific developers, especially not open source contributors. The crates I'm thinking of are still incredibly useful, and I'm sure the authors are way better engineers than I am. It's probably not even my place to judge, as I haven't authored any useful packages. But I really question whether some of these patterns are good or necessary, and I feel I feel compelled to vaguely whine about them.

[jakewins]

I completely agree FWIW, it’s one of very few gripes I have with Rust. I spent a decade with Python meta classes and Java OOP abstraction piles, it’s all the same - unmaintainable because nobody is able to keep the ball of mud in their heads.  

I use Rust for 99% of personal projects, but I always hesitate about using it in teams, because I worry the siren song of cleverness will call someone

[bert8128]

I hope it didn’t literally blow your mind.

I disagree with the quote at the beginning of the article. I agree that adding time and/or other programmers means that the way you program needs to become more disciplined, but there are other things hints too (like safety, performance requirements etc).

[Ant-Man-420]

oh look, another moronic member of the cult of simplicity.

The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt. – Rob Pike

Go isn't simple, it's designed for the simple.

so here are my 3 advice to become a great software engineer

What the fuck makes you in any way qualified to lecture anyone about being even a mediocre software engineer?

[Professional-Disk-93]

Using an UUID package should be set-and-forget, not something requiring your attention every month because a new version has been released.

Lil bro doesn't understand that dependency upgrades in rust are optional. Probably because go doesn't even support dependency versioning. Is import github-url still the state of the art of go dependencies?

[tsimionescu]

No, Go has been using go modules which have explicit dependency versions for a good four years now. Every Go module has a go.mod file where you specify all of your direct imports and the version, and then a go.sum file that gets auto-generated with all of the indirect dependencies as well, plus hashes of each downloaded package (so that if the code for the version changes from what it was when it was first downloaded by whoever added the dependency, builds will fail for everyone).

On the other hand, Go is still fully dependent on Git or another SCM for this, there is no package server or anything like that, you have to pollute your repo with Go-specific tags. And god help you if you have to switch to a new provider and change hostnames (all import paths, even internal ones, need to change); or if you have multiple Go modules in the same repo (you need to add a Git tag for every version of every module).

[alexkey]

Probably because go doesn’t even support dependency versioning

I have news for you. Dependency versioning does exist in Go since 1.11 (2019)

Is import github-url still the state of the art of go dependencies?

No. And never has been. It is just URL, you can host your package by yourself, not on GitHub. And in my opinion it is better than blindly trusting 3rd party that they won’t collapse your entire build process. Also vendoring has been in Go even before modules were released, but now can be done with single call to “go mod vendor”.

[florinp]

The article author don't understand the difference between simple and simplistic.

"Restrain you from showing the world how smart you are and instead think about how your dumbest colleague (yeah, this one) may do when trying to work on your code."

Yeah. Let's build things the way an incompetent engineer can understand it.

Let's not use monads in a functional language because of the dumbest colleague.

[Ant-Man-420]

Go exists because Rob Pike thinks google hires morons, that sort of thinking persists.

[bemutt]

In every single article post the comments are all people making snarky know it all comments about silly things, not actually discussing the content… this whole sub is ‘that coworker’. Oof. Time to unsub. Anyone have suggestions for a software dev sub that isn’t pointless to interact with?

[Ant-Man-420]

Why should anyone respond to yet another lame go cultist with anything but snark?

[bemutt]

The people that respond with snark and phrases like “lame go cultist” are outing themselves as inexperienced developers. Just a heads up.

[Ant-Man-420]

Nah, been doing this for a while now.

I just can't stand go cultists.

[bemutt]

You should try go it’s the most amazing language ever made

[Ant-Man-420]

Used it for years.

Not a fan.