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Tag Archives: go

It’s all about version 1.0.2

28 Jul

When Sun’s JDK version 1.0.2 was release I was finally able to create the first Java network application that made sense. This was the first version of the JDK that lived up to it’s two promisses.  (a) that the network was the computer and (b) write once and run anywhere.

Now that Google’s GO language compiler has reached it’s version 1.0.2 I have been longing for the days when the JDK was useful and manageable. GO feels like the JDK of old. The tools are more complete and mature than the JDK ever was. The APIs are mostly easy to understand and use. So many of the architecture features have been well thought out instead of just being workarounds; for example assertions, exceptions and error handling in general.

I’ve said it before.  Java has become our generations COBOL and GO has become the new Java.

What can I say? Version 1.0.2 seems to be a lucky number.

 
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Posted by on 2012/07/28 in architecture, ProgLang

 

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The next programming language you learn should be GO

21 Jul

I have been asked several times this past week about technologies I would choose to build my next application. There was a time when I adopted Java and the most of the world was still looking at Microsoft’s Visual Studio line of languages.

There was a time when people used to say “no one ever got fired for buying IBM” and more recently this rule was applied to Microsoft.

Java has now displaced COBOL in a lot of mainframe and other big iron installations. While it is stable in many environments it is still encumbered by licensing, deep dependencies, lack of a quality rating system, and is still not available on every platform.

Eventually GO may end up in the same place, however, the current state of the art tools for building and packaging GO application appear to be giving it a leg up. Also since the level of coding is somewhere between C and C++/Java one needs to take an algorithmic approach to software development. With any luck this means more performant code and scaling systems.

Google has deprecated several projects this year and terminated others. This is not always a good thing but clearly they are looking at their ROI as they should. It would be nice if Google would let us know what their commitment for LTS was going to be.

Unlike Java which was closed source for many years after it’s 1.0 release, GO has been open source since it’s beta days. I personally think they are lacking an IDE and a AppEngine toolkit similar to the python version. But for the moment it’s my goto after python.

 
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Posted by on 2012/07/21 in architecture, Tools

 

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GO’s missing feature fulfilled

25 Mar

I really like the GO language, however, I’ve had a couple of complaints that prevent me from using it in production. (a) the language has been a moving target and it seems that the 3rd party library developers have lost whatever momentum they had. (b) the absence of a version manager like RVM for Ruby or VirtualEnv for Python.

Well we cannot do anything about (a) because it’s as much political and emotional as it is technical and cost. But having (b) in our back pocket makes development so much easier(GVM – go version manager). I think once it makes it into the mainstream of GO development more real progress is going to be made.

Go offers a nice balance between perl, python, ruby, java, erlang, lisp and a few others. With it’s memory management, sockets, IPC, datatypes, compiled, formated, syntax… it’s just a nice balance.

 
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Posted by on 2012/03/25 in ProgLang, Tools

 

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Current News and Updates

22 Jun

Google released version 1.5.1 of App Engine. They added some significant APIs and features, however, in my mind it’s missing a GO update.

Tornado has been in version 1.2.1 for a long time… and the developers just release version 2.0. (download here) Looking at the release notes there are 3 major updates and several minor. Many of the minor updates are prerequisites. The most impressive will undoubtedly be support for python 3.2. However there may be some minor backward compatibility issues.

 
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Posted by on 2011/06/22 in beta, ProgLang, updates

 

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Should Go replace my use of Python?

22 Jun

Here is an interesting post that posited the question in my title: Experience porting 4k lines of C code to go http://bit.ly/jm0Qws

There are a lot of reasons to use GO. I like that it’s from Google but I don’t like that there is a release often approach. I need something that is a little more stable than that. Granted this offers some justification for deploying packages and the like and using goinstall in order to deploy and update packages as new releases of GO are made available. There is also something to be said about the monolithic codebase, however, that flies in the face of this deploy approach.

But I like the compiled performance, channels and the wealth of packages (It needs more like a performant web framework, templates and production ready database adapters.)

Go, while cool, is still a little half baked. Where python and perl are still up to the challenge.

 
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Posted by on 2011/06/22 in ProgLang

 

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