[GTALUG] Increasing interest in the Go language

[Christopher Browne]

On 2 February 2018 at 16:35, William Park via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
> You should be comparing Swift (iOS) with Ketlin (Android).  I'm leaning
> towards Ketlin, just I can't afford Apple.  We'll see what Google will
> do with Go.

Seems to me that these represent somewhat different courses...

Swift and Ketlin are primarily targeted at deploying frameworks for
deploying mobile applications on iOS and Android devices.

That's a meaningful set of purposes, but that's enormously different from
the deployment of server applications.

Go has gotten particularly popular for server application deployment in
the form of the Docker infrastructure where the typical user of Docker
has little reason to actually care what language Docker was written in,
just that it works decently well.

Myles' example upthread is a pretty good example of what Go is good
at; in a page or two of code, he produced an application (that I observe
does NOT have zillions of framework dependencies) that is reasonably
terse, reasonably easy to understand even if you don't know Go, and
which does a useful task without needing a huge amount of boilerplate
code.

The examples DCB has presented recently fit into the same category;
it sounds to me like Go made it reasonably easy to build terse apps
that didn't involve thousands of lines of references to framework
dependencies and such.

We've got some small projects getting deployed in Go at my work;
I should probably consider redoing some things I wrote in C in Go,
in the hopes that it's easier to deploy.  (That said, the latest thing
in C has actually served its purpose, and likely doesn't get run
again :-( )

The other language that I'd find it interesting to compare, to this end,
would be Rust.  It has some "easy library inclusion" helpers, and a
decent set of decently maintained libraries.

I imagine that "cryptocoinmarketcap.rs" (Myles' app, in Rust) would
be pretty near in size to the ~50 lines in Go and Python.

I'll observe that Graydon Hoare, creator of Rust, is now working at
Apple, on Swift.  <https://github.com/graydon>  So there's plenty
of "full circle" to be found :-)
-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"