One of my goals of 2014 was to learn a new programming language, and for various reasons I decided on Go. While my learning progress has been pretty terrible for most of the year, I was able to make pretty good progress this week.
(Chart generated using the awesome pygal library. Code can be found here.)
What made me get to 40% this month? Several things, but by far the most important one was A Tour of Go.
The tour is a fantastic resource for a person beginning to learn Go. It does a great job of explaining the important language features and constructs, and lets you try Go without having to install Go on your machine. This ability to try Go without having to install Go locally and setup your environment is incredibly powerful (this is how it works under the hood) and is something that I wish more languages incorporated into their websites. With the ability to compile almost anything down to Javascript one does not even have to build a remote sandbox environment (though that is more powerful and robust in my opinion) in order to introduce newcomers to your language.
I feel that the Tour could be improved by adding three things – syntax highlighting to the code in the console, more exercises, and including solutions to the exercises. Apart from that, I think it is a perfect learning resource.
My thoughts on Go? I think it is an interesting language, and something that I will most certainly delving into more. I’d read some Go code before (mostly Docker code) so I was vaguely aware of what the language looked like. I was initially a bit hesitant about the fact that Go has both high level (e.g. functional programming) and low level (e.g. pointers) features, but I think I quite like this ability to have and use both. The concurrency primitives look excellent, and I can’t wait to write some code using it. Another thing that scared me a little was the lack of classes, but structs + interfaces seem to be powerful enough to deal with that. I’ve read online about Go’s lack of generics being a problem, but I haven’t written enough code in Go to comment on this issue. I really liked the fact that the Go compiler doesn’t allow you to compile code that has unused imports or unused variables.
Next steps – read Go by Example and An Introduction to Programming in Go, and begin writing Go code to implement the two phase commit protocol.
Karan Parikh 