Skip to main content

A Week with Go, Day 2

After dabbling a little bit on day 1, I dedicated some time on day 2 to skim through Go's language spec and standard libraries. A lot of it didn't have much relevance to me yet because I hadn't begun to play with those parts of the language. What caught my eye though was that Go supports the \v escape (obviously no one at Google has read Stop the Vertical Tab Madness). Welcome to 1963, folks.

In addition to tweaking how loops are written, Go has augmented the traditional syntax of if and switch statements too. I don't see the enhancement providing as much benefit as I do with for. It's almost as if someone decided to let people move the placement of if up a statement earlier just to be different, and it certainly doesn't read well.
x := recover()
if x != nil { ... }
vs
if x := recover(); x != nil { ... }

The list of available packages is rather impressive considering Go has been available for a year. Some packages are pretty standard, like math and cmath, while some other packages like patch, ebnf, and tabwriter look more intriguing. The regexp and rand packages look to me a bit bloated and could stand to be pared down a bit, regexp especially since Go allows multiple return values from functions; maybe someone just got API happy.

There's also a utility named gofmt which is used to format Go code. It serves as the official style guidelines in an attempt to avoid code formatting wars. I don't agree with some of their choices, but that only highlights the usefulness of gofmt. More languages should ship with such a utility officially. gofmt can also be used as a sort of lint application since it can't properly format code with syntax errors.

The selection of library packages for Go will hopefully continue to grow over time, and a tool like gofmt is nice to have in your arsenal. I'm still thinking favorably of Go after the second day.

Feel free to share your impressions of Go in the comments below and come back tomorrow for day 3.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Chris SotherdenDecember 1, 2010 at 12:28 AM

    "if x := recover(); x != nil { ... }"

    Kind of reminds me of what I used to do with the ternary operator in perl until Dave yelled at me for it.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Writing a Minimal PSR-0 Autoloader

An excellent overview of autoloading in PHP and the PSR-0 standard was written by Hari K T over at PHPMaster.com , and it's definitely worth the read. But maybe you don't like some of the bloated, heavier autoloader offerings provided by various PHP frameworks, or maybe you just like to roll your own solutions. Is it possible to roll your own minimal loader and still be compliant? First, let's look at what PSR-0 mandates, taken directly from the standards document on GitHub : A fully-qualified namespace and class must have the following structure \<Vendor Name>\(<Namespace>\)*<Class Name> Each namespace must have a top-level namespace ("Vendor Name"). Each namespace can have as many sub-namespaces as it wishes. Each namespace separator is converted to a DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR when loading from the file system. Each "_" character in the CLASS NAME is converted to a DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . The "_" character has no special ...
6 comments
Read more

What's Wrong with OOP

Proponents of Object Oriented Programming feel the paradigm yields code that is better organized, easier to understand and maintain, and reusable. They view procedural programming code as unwieldy spaghetti and embrace OO-centric design patterns as the "right way" to do things. They argue objects are easier to grasp because they model how we view the world. If the popularity of languages like Java and C# is any indication, they may be right. But after almost 20 years of OOP in the mainstream, there's still a large portion of programmers who resist it. If objects truly model the way people think of things in the real world, then why do people have a hard time understanding and working in OOP? I suspect the problem might be the focus on objects instead of actions. If I may quote from Steve Yegge's Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns : Verbs in Javaland are responsible for all the work, but as they are held in contempt by all, no Verb is ever permitted to wander about ...
9 comments
Read more

Learning Prolog

I'm not quite sure exactly I was searching for, but somehow I serendipitously stumbled upon the site learnprolognow.org a few months ago. It's the home for an introductory Prolog programming course. Logic programming offers an interesting way to think about your problems; I've been doing so much procedural and object-oriented programming in the past decade that it really took effort to think at a higher level! I found the most interesting features to be definite clause grammars (DCG), and unification. Difference lists are very powerful and Prolog's DCG syntax makes it easy to work with them. Specifying a grammar such as: s(s(NP,VP)) --> np(NP,X,Y,subject), vp(VP,X,Y). np(np(DET,NBAR,PP),X,Y,_) --> det(DET,X), nbar(NBAR,X,Y), pp(PP). np(np(DET,NBAR),X,Y,_) --> det(DET,X), nbar(NBAR,X,Y). np(np(PRO),X,Y,Z) --> pro(PRO,X,Y,Z). vp(vp(V),X,Y) --> v(V,X,Y). vp(vp(V,NP),X,Y) --> v(V,X,Y), np(NP,_,_,object). nbar(nbar(JP),X,3) --> jp(JP,X). pp(pp(PREP,N...
22 comments
Read more