This reminds me of that one guy on the go-nuts irc channel who asked for help with his Ruby port over to Go. He was scraping a set of web pages in Ruby and migrated that over to Go for its easy parallelization. His claim was that Go was 3x slower in speed. He pasted some code that seemed fine, but left out the context of what he was doing. At the end of the day, it as just an attempt to claim that Ruby is faster than Go. If he doesn't provide the entire context with benchmarks included, I'm just taking his word for it.
On another note, I built an algorithm using a bitset. At first, I used one of the libraries the author linked, but then I saw that it was easier to just do the bit-bashing myself for my particular use case. It's not that difficult if you are familiar with C and C++ programming.
If, however, you are coming over from a language like Python, Ruby, and even Java to criticize Go is an easy thing to do. Those are very high level languages that protect you from needing to understand types. The object oriented parts of Java languages give you the ability to use polymorphism, which is not as straight forward in Go. You don't have a common base class. You only have interfaces. Trying to recreate generic structures and then blame the language for not having them is foolish. If you can't program without generics, stick with Java from the beginning. Or better yet, don't do a project in Go until you understand how to approach problems the Go way.
I happen to like Go for the very reason that you don't deal with generics. Seeing the types make it easier for me to follow as opposed to following a chain of inheritance. Getting rid of all the factory code trims my code down. This makes things easier to read when you are not the author.
Comparing Java's compiler to any other compiler is going to have predictable results. Java may have the best compiler out there.
Generics, inheritance, and the factory pattern are completely orthogonal features. Adding generics would not entail adding inheritance, mandating the factory pattern, or any other slippery slope feature.
> Inheritance is overrated, and the factory pattern is often overused. Both of those happen with generics.
Generics have nothing to do with inheritance and the factory pattern. There are lots of languages that have generics but neither inheritance neither factories: SML, OCaml, Haskell, etc.
Inheritance makes generics harder, in fact, because type inference becomes undecidable in the general case.
Factories are basically a workaround for functions not being able to be freestanding (unattached to a class) in Java (the "kingdom of nouns"), a problem that Go doesn't have.
Generics have nothing to do with inheritance and the factory pattern.
Where do I say such a thing? I'm saying that generics are both overrated and overused.
Factories are basically a workaround for functions not being able to be freestanding (unattached to a class) in Java (the "kingdom of nouns"), a problem that Go doesn't have.
Being the "Kingdom of Nouns" is kinda the point of Smalltalk/Objective-C style OO. (Though Alan Kay once famously said that when he thought of OO, he was not thinking of Java.) That said, while it is nice to have someplace to put functions, there are times when it's also nice not to be forced to attach them to a class. Not so sure it's a problem as much as it's just a particular approach with its advantages and drawbacks.
Where do you get that Factories are "a workaround for functions not being able to be freestanding?"
>> Generics have nothing to do with inheritance and the factory pattern.
> Where do I say such a thing? I'm saying that generics are both overrated and overused.
It looks like that's what you're suggesting here:
> Inheritance is overrated, and the factory pattern is often overused. Both of those happen with generics.
---
> Where do you get that Factories are "a workaround for functions not being able to be freestanding?"
A factory is, conceptually, a function of some set of inputs that returns a new instance - which is, of course, exactly what a constructor is. Now, it's not always appropriate for a class to know every single way in which it might be assembled, so such responsibility is usually lifted out - the question is where to put it. We already have constructors, and those are functions, so it would seem reasonable that we could just write method similar to a constructor, place it in some other namespace (perhaps in a completely different package/module), and then pass that along to the component that needs to create these new instances.
For languages like Java, the problem is that functions are not first class - you can't directly pass along a method/function like (Conf -> SomeService), so instead, it's common to create some special type, like SomeServiceFactory. If, for comparison, you take a look at Scala/Haskell/C#/etc, you'll wont often spot /.*Factory/ anywhere, because a function (with the ability to close over free variables) is much more concise, and doesn't require defining new types (e.g. SomeServiceFactory, versus Function<Conf,SomeService>).
I think that, seen in this light, the practice of defining dedicated factory classes is a rather clumsy approach necessitated by the design of the underlying language.
> Inheritance is overrated, and the factory pattern is often overused. Both of those happen with generics.
Non-sequitur here. To me, it's clear that I'm saying that generics are overrated and overused. Your interpretation makes no sense!
For languages like Java, the problem is that functions are not first class - you can't directly pass along a method/function like (Conf -> SomeService), so instead, it's common to create some special type, like SomeServiceFactory.
Another non-sequitur here. Factory pattern was originally popularized in the GoF book as a way of providing an opportunity for polymorphism.
If, for comparison, you take a look at Scala/Haskell/C#/etc, you'll wont often spot /.Factory/ anywhere, because a function (with the ability to close over free variables) is much more concise*
Old hand at Smalltalk here -- over 10 years. You don't often see Factory classes in Smalltalk. We also have very easy and nimble closures over variables in the context they're defined. I still don't get what you're on about.
>> Inheritance is overrated, and the factory pattern is often overused. Both of those happen with generics.
> Non-sequitur here. To me, it's clear that I'm saying that generics are overrated and overused. Your interpretation makes no sense!
Ok, now I understand what you're saying. As an aside, I would suggest that most people (as is evident in this comment thread) would not interpret your statement the way you intended.
>> For languages like Java, the problem is that functions are not first class - you can't directly pass along a method/function like (Conf -> SomeService), so instead, it's common to create some special type, like SomeServiceFactory.
> Another non-sequitur here. Factory pattern was originally popularized in the GoF book as a way of providing an opportunity for polymorphism.
I agree (re: polymorphism), but I don't think that contradicts what I'm saying; functions with parametric polymorphism (with support for {co,contra,in}variance) provide the same benefits of class polymorphism in this context.
> Old hand at Smalltalk here -- over 10 years. You don't often see Factory classes in Smalltalk. We also have very easy and nimble closures over variables in the context they're defined. I still don't get what you're on about.
You're absolutely correct. However, my point was that in statically typed languages, generics are conducive to favoring closures over factories classes and inheritance. But, now I realize that we were arguing two different things.
>Non-sequitur here. To me, it's clear that I'm saying that generics are overrated and overused. Your interpretation makes no sense!
You are making the non-sequitur. His interpretation is the only one that makes sense. It is not clear at all that you are saying what you claim you are saying. You are in fact not saying anything like it. You are saying two things you don't like happen with generics, but that is completely false.
What do you mean "now"? That was the first thing I said to you. You may wish to consider that when many people are telling you that what you said was nonsense, it may not be that all of them are crazy.
Those are all object oriented features. I was trying to compare O.O. to golang's approach.
I like the fact that you are forced to look at the algorithm vs the class hierarchy. I like that you don't have to read through factories.
I do think that generics would be great if they found a way of implementing them, however, I do not think that you need generics in order to write this kind of project.
If you generate a lot of goroutines, the overhead for maintaining and scheduling them is fairly significant, particularly when compared to constructs like Python generators.
I've demonstrated this myself by comparing the goroutines example prime number generator to a similar version written using Python generators.
The python generator code was faster, but there was a hard limit to how many primes could be calculated this way; I hit the stack limit.
>This reminds me of that one guy on the go-nuts irc channel who asked for help with his Ruby port over to Go. He was scraping a set of web pages in Ruby and migrated that over to Go for its easy parallelization. His claim was that Go was 3x slower in speed. He pasted some code that seemed fine, but left out the context of what he was doing.
Yes, with the exception of that being a story about some random idiot with an axe to grind, and this being a totally competent guy, that goes into detail about what he did and how, what trouble spots he found etc.
I guess, it being a hired project, he can't share the actual code. But he provided tons of pain points, well articulated.
This notion that having a huge gaping defect is just a different way of doing things is absurd. Lacking parametric polymorphism is completely unacceptable. This is a solved problem as of 1973. There is no excuse. Inheritance has nothing to do with it, and "all the factory code" has even less to do with it. You are saying "I like go because it isn't java", which is fine, but you are implying that being java is necessary to have parametric polymorphism, which is not at all accurate.
On another note, I built an algorithm using a bitset. At first, I used one of the libraries the author linked, but then I saw that it was easier to just do the bit-bashing myself for my particular use case. It's not that difficult if you are familiar with C and C++ programming.
If, however, you are coming over from a language like Python, Ruby, and even Java to criticize Go is an easy thing to do. Those are very high level languages that protect you from needing to understand types. The object oriented parts of Java languages give you the ability to use polymorphism, which is not as straight forward in Go. You don't have a common base class. You only have interfaces. Trying to recreate generic structures and then blame the language for not having them is foolish. If you can't program without generics, stick with Java from the beginning. Or better yet, don't do a project in Go until you understand how to approach problems the Go way.
I happen to like Go for the very reason that you don't deal with generics. Seeing the types make it easier for me to follow as opposed to following a chain of inheritance. Getting rid of all the factory code trims my code down. This makes things easier to read when you are not the author.
Comparing Java's compiler to any other compiler is going to have predictable results. Java may have the best compiler out there.