The Best Feature of Go

I’ve been programming since the late 90’s and I’ve done quite a bit of coding in C, C++, a lot of it in PHP and some in Python as well. On the front-end I’ve done some JavaScript and I’ve also had the misfortune of programming in Java ๐Ÿ˜‰

I started programming in Go in 2012 and since then I haven’t wanted to program in any other language. I’ve had a handful of large Go implementations across two companies and by now I have my own short list of favourite features.

One of those features is not mentioned very often but it has changed things significantly for me, and that’s what I’m going to discuss here.

Continue reading “The Best Feature of Go”

Inheritance Semantics in Go

Contemporary application design discipline is deeply rooted in Object Oriented Analysis and Design and inheritance is a key concept in OOAD. Go does not support classes and inheritance in their classic OOP sense but since many of us are trained in OOP, the loss of an important design concept sometimes feels restrictive.

Even though I knew about embedding and interfaces, their connection with classic inheritance wasn’t quite obvious. I set out to understand how I could emulate the coarse inheritance semantics in Go, without going into fine nuances. That in turn has helped me understand embedding and interfaces in a deeper way and I hope it would help me better design Go types and methods for extensibility.

Continue reading “Inheritance Semantics in Go”

The Compiler as a Refactoring Aid

Recently, I sat down to refactor a Go application with a high-level design objective in place. The application had two conceptually separate entities implemented in different files but mashed into a single package. I needed to separate them out into their own packages. I wasn’t using an IDE — just Emacs with basic formatting and non-contextual auto-complete aids.

I started out by creating a new directory for the package to be split out and moved the files that contained most of the relevant code into that directory, without thinking of the consequences. I could just invoke the compiler and let it guide me through the process of fitting the pieces of the puzzle together. One of the nice features of modern compilers is that they don’t continue dumping out errors beyond a limit. This allows fixing a program in small steps, going by the changes in errors produced by the compilers.
Continue reading “The Compiler as a Refactoring Aid”

Go Workshop

Last week, I conducted a 2 day Go Workshop at my workplace. It was fun.

I started day 1 with the excellent Go at Google presentation by Rob Pike, followed by my own presentation of Go’s key features. The rest of Day 1 was spent taking the Go Tour.

The coolest thing I did was on day 2. I mirrored my laptop on the projector and went through a fresh install of Go from source on my [newly allocated] dev box. Everyone else had identical dev environments so they could follow what I was doing on-screen. At the end of it everyone had a functional Go workspace!

What’s even better, I showed them how super easy it is to create packages and use them in a program. From conducting the installation to demonstrating package creation, it only took 1 hour. This included 10 minutes fiddling with Vim settings for syntax highlighting — the most difficult part of the entire session ๐Ÿ˜‰

Presenting slide decks is one thing. It’s a totally different experience when you do a live demo with no prior preparation except the confidence that what you’re about to demo will work without much fuss.