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Chris Cochrun 2022-01-03 12:41:35 -06:00
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<p>I might be terrible at learning human languages, but I really enjoy learning
programming languages. In my <a href="https://www.rousette.org.uk/archives/digital-spring-clean/">last post</a>, I mentioned setting up <a href="https://johnnydecimal.com/">Johnny.Decimal</a>,
and that I was thinking of writing some tools to help me interact with the
system. I&rsquo;m a dedicated <a href="https://www.alfredapp.com">Alfred</a> user, and when I spotted a very nifty library
called <a href="https://github.com/deanishe/awgo">awgo</a> for writing Alfred workflows in <a href="https://golang.org">Go</a>, it seemed like the perfect
excuse to dip my toes in Go and learn another programming language. The result
after only a couple of weeks of tinkering in spare moments was this <a href="https://github.com/bsag/alfred-jd">alfred-jd
workflow</a>. I really like Go.</p>
<p>After only two weeks, I am obviously nowhere near an expert (or even a novice),
but Go is a language that is easy to pick up. You can get started quickly and
write some surprisingly useful and elegant code without needing to spend months
learning a lot of syntax. The awgo library helped me enormously, as the wrappers
it provides (not to mention the very useful examples given), did a lot of the
heavy lifting and enabled me to have something basically functional running
quite quickly.</p>
<p>But Go itself is a very programmer-friendly language. The syntax is relatively
simple but powerful, and if you run through the interactive <a href="https://tour.golang.org/welcome/1">Go Tour</a>, you&rsquo;ll
learn most of what you need. It is a compiled language, and if you use (as I do)
an editor with support for the <a href="https://emacs-lsp.github.io/lsp-mode/page/lsp-gopls/">Go LSP server</a> (Emacs in my case), it&rsquo;s like having a
Go expert looking over your shoulder and pointing out what you are doing wrong.
It interactively picks up on unused variables, incorrect types and so on, and
automatically formats your code each time you save. If you pay attention to
these errors and learn how to fix them, your code will usually build first time,
and you quickly get into good habits.</p>
<p>I am finding Go to be an elegant and efficient language. The standard libraries
that are built into Go are comprehensive and easy to use, and almost everything
you need (from a compiler to a test framework and full offline documentation of
the standard libraries) is built in when you install Go. If you&rsquo;ve written code
in languages like Python or Ruby (which are themselves fun to code in), the fact
that you don&rsquo;t need to install virtual environments to manage packages and their
dependencies is a real relief. My only previous exposure to Go was as an
end-user of Hugo (the software that builds this blog). Even then I had
benefited from the fact that Go builds binaries (cross-platform if you want)
which are self-contained: all you need to do is install the single binary, and
everything will work. That, coupled with the fact that Go is so fast and
efficient, and has good built-in libraries for command line flags and so on, makes
me think that I will probably build little scripts to solve tasks in Go from now
on. Ruby or Python always seem like the best use-case for those kinds of tasks,
but then you try running your script again six months after writing it, and find
that it doesn&rsquo;t work because some dependency has broken somewhere.</p>
<p>I usually find that when I learn programming languages, the basics are easy to
pick up, but then I hit a wall when trying to build larger, more modular
programmes into libraries. However, I quite quickly picked up the way that Go
packages work, because it&rsquo;s very straightforward. Similarly, understanding how
to use libraries (standard or external) is easy to grasp. I&rsquo;m planning to
improve and extend my Alfred workflow, but I&rsquo;m now reading a couple of Go books
(<a href="https://www.manning.com/books/go-in-action">Go in Action</a> and <a href="https://pragprog.com/titles/rggo/powerful-command-line-applications-in-go/">Powerful Command-Line Applications in Go</a>) in order to deepen
my knowledge and make sure that I am building things in an idiomatically &lsquo;Go&rsquo; way
that makes the most of the language and is robust. So far, I&rsquo;ve actually grasped
how pointers work, which is something which had eluded me whenever I had come
across them in other languages, so that is definite progress!</p>