zlacker

>>simonw+(OP)
I wonder if the era of dynamic programming languages is over. Python/JS/Ruby/etc. were good tradeoffs when developer time mattered. But now that most code is written by LLMs, it's as "hard" for the LLM to write Python as it is to write Rust/Go (assuming enough training data on the language ofc; LLMs still can't write Gleam/Janet/CommonLisp/etc.).

Esp. with Go's quick compile time, I can see myself using it more and more even in my one-off scripts that would have used Python/Bash otherwise. Plus, I get a binary that I can port to other systems w/o problem.

Compiled is back?

>>behnam+sj
I have certainly become Go-curious thanks to coding agents - I have a medium sized side-project in progress using Go at the moment and it's been surprisingly smooth sailing considering I hardly know the language.

The Go standard library is a particularly good fit for building network services and web proxies, which fits this project perfectly.

>>simonw+eo
It's funny seeing you say that, because I've had an entire arc of despising the design of, and peremptorily refusing to use, Go, to really enjoying it, thanks to AI coding agents being able to take care of the boilerplate for me.

It turns out that verbosity isn't really a problem when LLMs are the one writing the code based on more high level markdown specs (describing logic, architecture, algorithms, concurrency, etc), and Go's extreme simplicity, small range of language constructs, and explicitness (especially in error handling and control flow) make it much easier to quickly and accurately review agent code.

It also means that Go's incredible (IMO) runtime, toolchain, and standard library are no longer marred by the boilerplate either, and I can begin to really appreciate their brilliance. It has me really reconsidering a lot of what I believed about language design.

>>logicp+St
Yeah, I much prefer Go to Rust for LLM things because I find Go code easy to read and understand despite having little experience with it - Rust syntax still trips me up.

>>simonw+Cv
Not to mention that, in general, there's a lot more to keep in mind with Rust.

I've written probably tens of thousands of lines of Rust at this point, and while I used to absolutely adore it, I've really completely fallen out of love with it, and part of it is that it's not just the syntax that's horrible to look at (which I only realized after spending some time with Go and Python), but you have to always keep in mind a lot of things:

- the borrow checker - lifetimes, - all the different kinds of types that represent different ways of doing memory management - parse out sometimes extremely complex and nearly point-free iterator chaining - deal with a complex type system that can become very unwieldy if you're not careful - and more I'm probably not thinking of right now

Not to mention the way the standard library exposes you to the full bore of all the platform-specific complexities it's designed on top of, and forces you to deal with them, instead of exposing a best-effort POSIX-like unified interface, so path and file handling can be hellish. (this is basically the reverse of fasterthanlime's point in the famous "I want off mr. golang's wild ride" essay).

It's just a lot more cognitive overhead to just getting something done if all you want is a fast statically compiled, modern programming language. And it makes it even harder to review code. People complain about Go boilerplate, but really, IME, Rust boilerplate is far, far worse.