Don’t continue reading if you’re a pussy, 9-year old boy or afraid of little bit “strong” writing.
This is like standing at a podium as a huge banner unfurls behind you saying “I AM A JOKE” and a pantless marching band comes out on stage playing a off-key version of Yackety Sax.
I definitely do not give a single solitary shit what the author thinks after that.
There is very little quite so tiresome as the “I’m going to give it to you straight, and by straight I mean with lots of cuss words” sort of truth telling. It so rarely actually has any truths to tell.
It looks like he’s removed that line now. But the tone remains that way throughout… Public discourse has standards that are required if you expect to be engaged.
Trolling and terrible writing aside, I’d be far more interested in the opinions of people who have been using the language for more than a whole 4 months, and who have actually used it in production.
None of those seem particularly bad to me. In fact, the variable shadowing seems like people getting what they deserve for shadowing a variable in an inner scope like that ;-)
On the other hand, maybe years of C++ has numbed me to it.
I’ve been using Go for years, since before 1.0 was released. In side projects (that I count on and use every day, at home and at work). In academic research. And now in production. Several of the things the author mentions are benefits of the language. For example, I love go generate. Others might be reasonably considered warts or footguns, but they are warts that simply haven’t caused many (if any at all) problems for me personally.
If somebody announces “Hi, I’m trolling!” I think it’s a reasonable tradeoff to decide you’re not interested in reading the rest of the post to determine if that’s true or not.
I probably could have put up with around half the intro, but at some point I grow tired of reading why I’m not going to like what comes next.
That’s typically where the scroll keys come in handy. :)
I’ve noticed (over the last year or two) that people seem to be increasingly reluctant to try and find the good with the bad when it comes to technology posts, often to the point of (as with your GP) proudly proclaiming their impatience. At least the author here had the decency to be up-front, even though the edginess was sorta tiring.
I’ve noticed (over the last year or two) that people seem to be increasingly reluctant to try and find the good with the bad when it comes to technology posts
My time is too precious to waste it reading poorly written content. If the ideas have merit they’ll be written up again by better authors.
I feel like poor language indicates lazy thought, and lazy thinkers often don’t have as deep and interesting insights as they think they do ;)
Shrug. I don’t typically use comic sans. Anyway, I think complaints about comic sans say more about the reader than the presenter, where as calling the reader a pussy says more about the author.
OpenBSD definitely gets justifiable criticism for that, and the pot being black doesn’t make the kettle not black.
(IMO, while the Comic Sans thing is stupid and unprofessional, the bigger issue is that they typically deliver these things in a complicated binary format for which decoders have already had serious vulnerabilities, which sort of flies in the face of their entire raison d'être of worrying about security first and foremost.)
Their presentations are either presented as PDFs, which already integrate with screen readers & tools like pdf2text, or are presented as webpages with images - and those presentations have plain text or HTML slides as well:
(and c'mon, if you (not you specifically but y'all) can’t tell the difference between light ribbing directed at people who believe in form over function and starting your paper with GTFO PUSSIES then, uh.)
Whenever I’ve seen them linked it’s been a page full'o jpegs, and I’ve certainly never bothered investigating further. Good that that’s not the only format they’re available in; bad that it’s the only one I’ve seen, and still stupid and unprofessional that they format it like a middle schooler in the 90s.
And yes, I don’t think the two are comparable. To take the pot-and-kettle metaphor way too far, OpenBSD is at worst lightly scorched here. Not perfect, but at least mostly not actively insulting their audience.
While that is true, if you do that, you should not leave a comment about how you didn’t read the article and therefore have nothing interesting to say about it.
I’m pretty tone agnostic, actually, so I probably wouldn’t notice or care, except when the author goes out of their way to tell me how bad the tone is. If you know your tone is so bad that you have to warn people about it, but choose not to fix the tone, well… I think you have chosen poorly. It seems to reflect a desire to be more shocking than informative.
It’s definitely not a tone argument. Me saying your tone is shitty is only a tone argument if I’m also saying that makes you wrong, in the same way that ad hominems aren’t actually just insults.
I don’t know if that’s strictly true. The typical example of a tone argument is an angry feminist being told “if you were less angry, people would be more receptive to your argument” (as a euphemism for “please make your point in a format I can more easily ignore”) with no reference to its truth value.
Regardless, this author is (a) not underprivileged relative to the people criticizing his tone, and (b) not justifiably angry anyway, so I don’t see a problem here.
You’re saying that the tone he is using is sufficient to invalidate what he is saying
Pretty sure what the parent was saying is that the tone the author is using, for him as a reader, is sufficient to ignore what the author is saying, without making any claims as to whether the author’s points about Go are correct or not.
“This paper is so caked in stinky shit I refuse to read it” is different than “this paper is so caked in stinky shit that whatever is written on it must be wrong”.
I don’t disagree with your point, or desire to point out your wrongness here. I do wish to share that I found it entertaining that you don’t like his tone, but use one like it for most of your own discussion. Again, I’m not criticizing (this is a different medium and you have different goals, for starters of why it doesn’t matter), I just found it causal of some chuckling.
I don’t use gendered slurs, nor do I posture that cursing is some sort of bad-boy bullshit. If you think the author lost me because of his “strong” writing then you’re not paying attention.
I will say that I am not a huge fan of Go myself, but the language the author uses here to start off is a fabulous way of alientating a ton of folks (regardless of their stance on the Go itself). Kind of impossible to take it seriously after that.
But frankly, I struggle with Medium overall because they constantly block my access to the page anyway (I use a useragent that they don’t seem to like), so I essentially don’t click on Medium links anymore.
Tangential: pinboard on twitter has had a pretty good stream of tweets about medium over the past few days. Starts oct 25, plus a few more on the 27th.
I was pretty annoyed by number 4, but reddit comments pointed out that since slices are mutable, it’s not safe to treat slices of []StringImplementer as []String, as the function could insert some other type that implements the String interface into your slice.
Apparently the technical way to say it is that slices aren’t covariant.
Though this brings up another painful part of the language, that there’s no way to make an immutable slice.
Great article. Having spent time with Go, I am comfortable saying that, just like Java and Python, it is a mediocre language with many flaws that will take over the world; people who are aware of these flaws will be derided as academics who nit pick, and are unaware that “all languages are equivalent”.
Nearly all the incompatible changes in Python 3 are to fix flaws in Python 2. There are some others, though.
You can invoke x[-1], or worse, x[:-1], by an accidental bug in your address arithmetic.
You can write your Python code in any supported character encoding, not just UTF-8. Partly as a consequence, you can get a compile error by putting non-ASCII characters in a comment.
CPython runs about 100× slower than C. This is both more and less of a problem than a few years ago: more of a problem because Moore’s Law has ended, so it’s harder to justify trading off development time for execution time, and less of a problem because the gold standard is now GLSL or CUDA or something, not C, and CPython code might be in just as good a position as C code for that. (However, you can also use V8 or LuaJIT now.)
Typically when you get a type error from invoking a library function with parameters of the wrong type, instead of getting an error message saying something like “you can’t invoke bisect.bisect(‘a list, 'a) with types (string, string list)”, the error message has a few stack trace levels of code down inside the library, and then the resulting error message may or may not have any obvious connection to the actual error in your source code. This is especially bad with libraries like Pandas whose functions can be called with any of various combinations of types, trying each one in sequence until it finds one that works — the error message typically refers just to the last one it tried, which may not be the one you intended.
I have wondered about D a few times over the years. When I was most seriously looking into it (admittedly quite a while back) I think it was right around the start of D2, and there was much confusion about D2 as well as the whole phobos vs stdlib thing, few platforms supported, etc. Things in generally just didn’t feel very organized, and it seemed like a bad time to burn cycles learning it. Can I assume, based on the fact that I am starting to see more articles about D pop up in various places lately, that things are much better now?
This is like standing at a podium as a huge banner unfurls behind you saying “I AM A JOKE” and a pantless marching band comes out on stage playing a off-key version of Yackety Sax.
I definitely do not give a single solitary shit what the author thinks after that.
There is very little quite so tiresome as the “I’m going to give it to you straight, and by straight I mean with lots of cuss words” sort of truth telling. It so rarely actually has any truths to tell.
Skimming the article, the author seemed to have some good points with solid examples, particularly the bit about slice manipulation.
But the writing was so intolerable I quit reading.
It looks like he’s removed that line now. But the tone remains that way throughout… Public discourse has standards that are required if you expect to be engaged.
Trolling and terrible writing aside, I’d be far more interested in the opinions of people who have been using the language for more than a whole 4 months, and who have actually used it in production.
None of those seem particularly bad to me. In fact, the variable shadowing seems like people getting what they deserve for shadowing a variable in an inner scope like that ;-)
On the other hand, maybe years of C++ has numbed me to it.
I’ve been using Go for years, since before 1.0 was released. In side projects (that I count on and use every day, at home and at work). In academic research. And now in production. Several of the things the author mentions are benefits of the language. For example, I love
go generate. Others might be reasonably considered warts or footguns, but they are warts that simply haven’t caused many (if any at all) problems for me personally.So, you have no opinion on the technical complaints presented in the article?
If somebody announces “Hi, I’m trolling!” I think it’s a reasonable tradeoff to decide you’re not interested in reading the rest of the post to determine if that’s true or not.
I probably could have put up with around half the intro, but at some point I grow tired of reading why I’m not going to like what comes next.
That’s typically where the scroll keys come in handy. :)
I’ve noticed (over the last year or two) that people seem to be increasingly reluctant to try and find the good with the bad when it comes to technology posts, often to the point of (as with your GP) proudly proclaiming their impatience. At least the author here had the decency to be up-front, even though the edginess was sorta tiring.
Ah, so I don’t ordinarily complain about such things. I’m thankful the author has been so considerate as to tell me not to waste my time. :)
I just don’t have any opinion about the rest, since I didn’t read it, which I only mention since there seemed to be a thread going.
Personally, I’m fine with anything in an article besides unwarranted swearing. I don’t enjoy reading it and have a hard time blocking it out.
My time is too precious to waste it reading poorly written content. If the ideas have merit they’ll be written up again by better authors.
I feel like poor language indicates lazy thought, and lazy thinkers often don’t have as deep and interesting insights as they think they do ;)
Meanwhile, OpenBSD continues to produce “serious” presentations in Comic Sans, which doesn’t at all scream “Hi, I’m trolling!”
Pot, Kettle, it’s all the same in this kitchen. Now excuse me as my karma burns away for daring to point out the above hypocrisy.
No, your karma will burn away for the tired old “I’ll lose karma for this”. It adds nothing to the discussion. Please don’t do it.
Shrug. I don’t typically use comic sans. Anyway, I think complaints about comic sans say more about the reader than the presenter, where as calling the reader a pussy says more about the author.
Nit, he didn’t call the reader a pussy.
OpenBSD definitely gets justifiable criticism for that, and the pot being black doesn’t make the kettle not black.
(IMO, while the Comic Sans thing is stupid and unprofessional, the bigger issue is that they typically deliver these things in a complicated binary format for which decoders have already had serious vulnerabilities, which sort of flies in the face of their entire raison d'être of worrying about security first and foremost.)
Their presentations are either presented as PDFs, which already integrate with screen readers & tools like pdf2text, or are presented as webpages with images - and those presentations have plain text or HTML slides as well:
http://www.openbsd.org/papers/tame-fsec2015/mgp00023.txt
http://www.openbsd.org/papers/eurobsdcon2015-raceless-network/img6.html
(and c'mon, if you (not you specifically but y'all) can’t tell the difference between light ribbing directed at people who believe in form over function and starting your paper with GTFO PUSSIES then, uh.)
Whenever I’ve seen them linked it’s been a page full'o jpegs, and I’ve certainly never bothered investigating further. Good that that’s not the only format they’re available in; bad that it’s the only one I’ve seen, and still stupid and unprofessional that they format it like a middle schooler in the 90s.
And yes, I don’t think the two are comparable. To take the pot-and-kettle metaphor way too far, OpenBSD is at worst lightly scorched here. Not perfect, but at least mostly not actively insulting their audience.
While that is true, if you do that, you should not leave a comment about how you didn’t read the article and therefore have nothing interesting to say about it.
Why the fuck would I wade through the rest of that shit just to find out what the author thinks?
Opinions about why Go is a poorly designed language are not so valuable or rare that I feel obliged to pick the peanuts out of the poop here.
Precisely. It’s not like you’re obligated to read every word everywhere, even on a subject you might be interested in.
“Peanuts out of the poop.” Thanks, that’s my new favorite phrase.
That’s pretty much a classic Tone Argument… not saying it’s great writing, but maybe look through the writing to the arguments more?
I’m pretty tone agnostic, actually, so I probably wouldn’t notice or care, except when the author goes out of their way to tell me how bad the tone is. If you know your tone is so bad that you have to warn people about it, but choose not to fix the tone, well… I think you have chosen poorly. It seems to reflect a desire to be more shocking than informative.
It’s definitely not a tone argument. Me saying your tone is shitty is only a tone argument if I’m also saying that makes you wrong, in the same way that ad hominems aren’t actually just insults.
I don’t know if that’s strictly true. The typical example of a tone argument is an angry feminist being told “if you were less angry, people would be more receptive to your argument” (as a euphemism for “please make your point in a format I can more easily ignore”) with no reference to its truth value.
Regardless, this author is (a) not underprivileged relative to the people criticizing his tone, and (b) not justifiably angry anyway, so I don’t see a problem here.
You’re saying that the tone he is using is sufficient to invalidate what he is saying. I’m pretty comfortable calling that a Tone Argument.
Pretty sure what the parent was saying is that the tone the author is using, for him as a reader, is sufficient to ignore what the author is saying, without making any claims as to whether the author’s points about Go are correct or not.
“This paper is so caked in stinky shit I refuse to read it” is different than “this paper is so caked in stinky shit that whatever is written on it must be wrong”.
Eh … isn’t that exactly what you are doing? You don’t like him writing like you usually do, and use that to dismiss everything he has to say.
Do I use gendered slurs? No. No, I don’t.
Dick, pussy and asshole are all slurs. Gender doesn’t come into it (and it’s interesting that you would consider genitalia to be gendered).
Are you trying to imply that if he used an inclusive she/he/they/xir/zhe/… you would have had no trouble reading the article?
I don’t disagree with your point, or desire to point out your wrongness here. I do wish to share that I found it entertaining that you don’t like his tone, but use one like it for most of your own discussion. Again, I’m not criticizing (this is a different medium and you have different goals, for starters of why it doesn’t matter), I just found it causal of some chuckling.
I don’t use gendered slurs, nor do I posture that cursing is some sort of bad-boy bullshit. If you think the author lost me because of his “strong” writing then you’re not paying attention.
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I will say that I am not a huge fan of Go myself, but the language the author uses here to start off is a fabulous way of alientating a ton of folks (regardless of their stance on the Go itself). Kind of impossible to take it seriously after that.
But frankly, I struggle with Medium overall because they constantly block my access to the page anyway (I use a useragent that they don’t seem to like), so I essentially don’t click on Medium links anymore.
Tangential: pinboard on twitter has had a pretty good stream of tweets about medium over the past few days. Starts oct 25, plus a few more on the 27th.
I was pretty annoyed by number 4, but reddit comments pointed out that since slices are mutable, it’s not safe to treat slices of []StringImplementer as []String, as the function could insert some other type that implements the String interface into your slice.
Apparently the technical way to say it is that slices aren’t covariant.
Though this brings up another painful part of the language, that there’s no way to make an immutable slice.
Great article. Having spent time with Go, I am comfortable saying that, just like Java and Python, it is a mediocre language with many flaws that will take over the world; people who are aware of these flaws will be derided as academics who nit pick, and are unaware that “all languages are equivalent”.
I am curious, what are some flaws of Python? I code in Python and I would love to understand its flaws.
Nearly all the incompatible changes in Python 3 are to fix flaws in Python 2. There are some others, though.
You can invoke
x[-1], or worse,x[:-1], by an accidental bug in your address arithmetic.You can write your Python code in any supported character encoding, not just UTF-8. Partly as a consequence, you can get a compile error by putting non-ASCII characters in a comment.
CPython runs about 100× slower than C. This is both more and less of a problem than a few years ago: more of a problem because Moore’s Law has ended, so it’s harder to justify trading off development time for execution time, and less of a problem because the gold standard is now GLSL or CUDA or something, not C, and CPython code might be in just as good a position as C code for that. (However, you can also use V8 or LuaJIT now.)
Typically when you get a type error from invoking a library function with parameters of the wrong type, instead of getting an error message saying something like “you can’t invoke bisect.bisect(‘a list, 'a) with types (string, string list)”, the error message has a few stack trace levels of code down inside the library, and then the resulting error message may or may not have any obvious connection to the actual error in your source code. This is especially bad with libraries like Pandas whose functions can be called with any of various combinations of types, trying each one in sequence until it finds one that works — the error message typically refers just to the last one it tried, which may not be the one you intended.
I wrote this up several years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3580590
Today I could elucidate on each point in nuanced depth and add more points.
i was at a similar point but then decided to move to D. never looked back.
/me slides Haskell over to yawniek. tip toes away
I have wondered about D a few times over the years. When I was most seriously looking into it (admittedly quite a while back) I think it was right around the start of D2, and there was much confusion about D2 as well as the whole phobos vs stdlib thing, few platforms supported, etc. Things in generally just didn’t feel very organized, and it seemed like a bad time to burn cycles learning it. Can I assume, based on the fact that I am starting to see more articles about D pop up in various places lately, that things are much better now?