Go is oddly overrated

We have so many great projects out there being made using Go, such as Kubernetes or Prometheus. So I believe the language must also be great to have garnered such successes. But most of the successful names are from the CLI or infra/system world. Go’s popularity didn’t just stop just there though. Such as, it has spreaded to Backend development as well and the hype is still going very strong. This is the part where I don’t understand at all.

What makes Go great to me

In my opinion, Go is a very cool language. It has so many features that’s hard to find anywhere else. Or, at least those features aren’t usually packed into one single language like Go.

A Go project can be built into a standalone binary, which make it so easy to transport around or deploy and use. There is no need to mess around to set up an environment before running the build artifact, like in JS or Python. You have a single binary that you can just run. And build speed is super fast too.

It’s a functional language at heart, which makes it much easier to approach than something like Java or C#. It even sidestepped from the usual OOP concepts and instead leaning more toward a composition style of programming. While I don’t hate OOP at all, all the inheritence stuff requires a lot of forward thinking and careful design in order to get it right. But not a lot of people can do it right. So OOP projects tend to devolve into a hot pile of mess because of that. That’s why nowadays people always encourage composition over inheritence whenever possible.

But unlike other functional languages, Go can actually do some low level stuff as well. It’s not as low as something like C++, that’s for sure. But not many languages can reach that level anyway. Concurrency in Go is very convenient and easy as well, with its Goroutine.

It comes with a lot of things out of the box. Such as, it has a built-in formatter, a test framework, even a benchmark tool. What you have to use 3rd-party libraries in other languages instead came with the language by default in Go.

But the big part is, it’s backed by Google! Naturally the clout is huge. People will line up just to be a part of it. The community became so enormous just because of that. It’s very to reach out and to find help, when you have a problem.

What I don’t like about it

It’s just my personal feeling so I could be wrong, but the language to me feels like it’s that one kid in school who try too hard to be cool, you know? It has learned a lot from its predecessors so it can actually pull off some great feats. But what’s the catch?

It feels like the language is a big melting pot where the developers just try to throw anything they deemed cool into it while disregard other basic things. It looks good. It may smell good too. But it tastes weird to me.

In fact, the language feels like it starts as someone’s toy project, or a proof of concept just to prove some of the features work. So a lot of things are either missing or straight up a hassle to use because of neglectance. It makes me feel very uncomfortable using it for an extended amount of time.

There used to be no generic (the one related to reusability) in the language. That’s unacceptable for something came out in the modern days. Luckily that they implemented it later on. But it made me think that the language wasn’t actually well-thought-out at first.

Error handling is super annoying. It’s too explicit. While it debatably could be good, but man it is so annoying that I have to return and check if err != nil everytime. Then there is also panic, which imply an unexpected error that should terminate the app. But you can catch the panic too?! That’s kinda like exception in other languages!

Pointer is pain. I understand that pointer has its use. But I had hoped that the implementation would be better in DX comparing to C++. I had hoped that it is optional to use. But no, it’s just like in C++ where people sprinkle it everywhere possible. And similar to pointer in C++, the thing is a nightmare to look at (remember segfault?).

For a modern functional language, it lacks a lot of the usual data manipulation such as map or filter in the standard lib too. Those things come up very often day to day so I have to write a lot more code because I have to implement them myself.

Why I think it’s overrated

Even after all these rants, I still believe that Go is a great language. The reason I think it’s overrated is because people try to use it everywhere, especially Backend! Even though the language is advertised as a general purpose language, all of its goodnesses seem to be better fitting for CLI or infra/system tools.

All the downsides I mentioned make using it such a pain to me. Yes, it may have great performance and such. Yes, so many great tools out there were made using Go so the language must be good. But most of my problem is related to its DX. I’m not gonna feel happy using Go for my Backend job at all (unless the money is great, just kidding).

I get its appeal, but maybe it’s an aquired taste and I’m not there yet. Or maybe it’s just not for me.

Overall, I think Go should just stay where it’s already good at. It shouldn’t try to branch out too much. It’s in a similar vein to my other posts: not everything has to be good at everything.

Maybe later down the line, the language can improve itself into a great general purpose language. I very much will welcome that future. But right now? I don’t think it’s fully ready yet. And I don’t like how people are trying to shove it into everywhere they can. You can doesn’t mean you should!