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In the last year, we've managed to get real builders using places like Scaleway. I think Scaleway hosts all the inter-builders. Now we have real builders in the dashboards, which means that the Go project can produce a real tarball for everyone to use, which is exactly what I wanted. It's graduated from being a side pr... |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think the blog post I'm waiting for the most is the "How does Dave Cheney make more time in a day?", because... \[laughter\] You have a day job, you contribute to Go, you contribute to proposals for language changes... Recently you've been traveling a lot, doing talks at a lot of Go conferences. ... |
**Dave Cheney:** Yeah, it's a pretty full schedule. The magic of Australia is that it's a day or two on a plane any way you want to go. I don't know, I've always been very lucky. Canonical was extremely supportive of me, working on Go, and they even sponsored Arm and I to work on the first cut of the Arm 64 board. That... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Well, on behalf of all of the people across the world, we all really appreciate the effort that you put into proselytizing Go, teaching everybody and building community. I don't think the Go community would be the way it is now without you, so thank you. |
**Dave Cheney:** Thanks, Brian. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Yeah, I thoroughly agree with that. |
**Erik St. Martin:** I have to add my name to the list of people who learned a ton from Dave's blog, especially in the early days. When Brian and I were starting out, in late 2011, early 2012, there wasn't a lot of content out there. |
**Dave Cheney:** I feel really lucky and privileged to be able to do that, because it was this base that I could fill up with words. There were some great things to say about Go. I was learning a lot about it, and I wanted to tell other people about it, and there was just an opportunity. |
\[07:55\] If you had met me, as I said, five or ten years ago, you wouldn't have picked me for any of these things. I don't know whether I've had to learn them or whether I've been lucky to learn to be a public speaker. I haven't done any public speaking since high-school. I thought when I graduated I can just throw aw... |
As an engineer, leaving high-school, I thought "Non-fiction writing - who needs that? We just need code." |
**Brian Ketelsen:** \[laughs\] Well, I think we've spent 14 minutes now on Dave Cheney fanboyism, so why don't we slow down on the ass-kissing session for just a minute and talk about some of the really cool things that you've done lately. You gave a great talk at Golang UK last week about solid design. Why don't you t... |
**Dave Cheney:** The meat of that talk - the solid design principles - came out of a presentation I did a couple months ago in Perth to Dave Thomas' YOW! group of conferences. That talk was to a group of people who didn't really know Go; it was a mixed bag of technologists, most of whom were very passionate about funct... |
My bigger message was that Go programmers need to start thinking about how programs are designed, because the alternative is that we'll just become the JavaScript framework of the month, and possibly replaced by something else. But if we think about design and more importantly talk about design, develop a language to t... |
**Erik St. Martin:** So Dave definitely listened to this show, because Brian rants about the number of HTTP routers about every episode. \[laughter\] |
**Dave Cheney:** The other talk I gave at Golang UK was about how to write faster Go code, so I might be a little bit hypocritical in dumping on people who are writing HTTP routers, but the bigger picture is that the Go code that we write today has to be maintained, it has to be changeable; it can't just be something w... |
Otherwise, maybe in five years people will be like, "Oh, this Go code... It's not maintainable. What are we gonna do?" and they'll rewrite it in something else and continue that search for the next thing. To be an investment that a company is gonna make for a decade or more. The maintenance of the program is far more i... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** \[11:38\] There is another aspect of thinking about design. For me, it does take effort; it does take effort in you learning what good design means. But once you start learning it, it makes coding easier. For example, when I started learning Go, I would think "Where do I put things?" and I see pe... |
There are multiple layers and multiple reasons for you to think about design, I think. |
**Dave Cheney:** That's exactly right, and you touched on a really important thing - you just said "good code" there, but that's super subjective. What is good code? Well, I like it to look a certain way, I like to have long identifiers, I like to call my receiver this, rather than the single letter that we're used to,... |
The thing Martin says about the solid principles is that they're not rules, they're guidelines. You can say every now and then, "Look, I should be honest in all my dealings, I should be truthful with my friends", but sometimes you have to bend the rules, tell a little white lie, those kinds of things. When you talk abo... |
It's interesting to talk about design using those kinds of words, rather than things like, "I don't like that. That code should be more beautiful", or "I don't like it, it should be shorter." These are not really actionable to have in a wider design context, because everyone's ideas are different. "How short is short? ... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Right. Some of those things that people point out are more from an aesthetic standpoint, and it's like art - what I appreciate is gonna always be different from what you appreciate, but I think we can both agree that two highly coupled components are hard to maintain. We can collectively agree on t... |
I really appreciated that people were talking about making clean abstractions and maintainful code, so I like the idea that we're starting to talk about that in the Go world, as well. |
**Dave Cheney:** Yes, absolutely. I think it's critical, because if companies are going to invest in the long-term -- and they have started. We have Docker, all the CoreOS products, all the HashiCorp products, Kubernetes - there's an investment. But to make that investment pay off in the future, it can't just be just s... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** My question is, if there's a maturity model for Go as we evolve into a more popular language and a more well-adopted language, does that mean we have to go through some ugly growth phases, like Gang of Four patterns and Enterprise JavaBeans? What does our maturity model look like in Go? |
**Dave Cheney:** \[16:09\] Does anybody else want to jump in while I think? |
**Erik St. Martin:** Sure. I think that Gang of Four is probably a little too far. I don't think we want to get into that, because the language is specifically kind of designed to prevent that - this whole inheritance chain and things like that. But I think that there are some lessons to be learned. Most of those abstr... |
To Dave's point, there should be objective goals that we're trying to achieve, and not necessarily set in stone patterns; that would be my take on that. |
**Dave Cheney:** I did have a section in the talk which I cut because I didn't have time, but mainly because I had a lot of pushback on it. I start the talk by saying, "Who does code review? Why do you do code review?" Somebody yelled out, "To find bad code", and that's really the hook there. I continued with, "So the ... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, and I think it also limits the possibilities. If we always refer to "You need to use one of these patterns", I think that it also kind of closes off creativity, but I think that we can generically talk about things. These two components should not be coupled together. |
I always mix up the two books... There is another book called Clean Code by Bob Martin as well, and then there's The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master - both of those books I really like. They have a lot of unique ideas. They show you that if one type seems to know too much about another type, maybe you h... |
We could talk about these at a very high level without having to go into, "Oh, this is a visitor pattern" or "This is a decorator pattern", or flywheel, or any of the other ones in the Gang of Four book. |
It's actually kind of interesting... I haven't had to think about the Gang of Four book in a number of years, since Java. And that's a good thing too, because I succinctly remember a piece of middleware that I swore somebody went through the book and found a use for every single pattern in the book. \[laughter\] |
**Dave Cheney:** So here's the weird thing about the patterns book. I guess it was written in the mid-to-late '80s, probably in the '90s... At the time, people - and I'm kind of gesticulating to the luminaries who thought that it would just be the first of many books; they thought there would be patterns in everything.... |
\[19:52\] It's not because Demarco and his friends I think Gamma sat down and thought up 30 patterns, and then they were like, "Okay, we've gotta do a second edition of the book." They observed them in code that they were looking at. They kind of got it back to front - they looked at this wide body of code and tried to... |
That really kind of set the patterns book as being the start of a way that we're gonna describe every piece of software design; it became this one point in time, of these couple dozen observations about software at that time, written in the '80s. |
One of the things about my talk - and I was very inspired to do it ironically in London, because Jim Warrick's talk from 2007 starts with talking about the Great Fire of London and saying then when they were going to rebuild London, they had all these proposals for how to rebuild London, and these questions... What he ... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, that's interesting. We could say the same about algorithms too, right? There's a lot of clearly defined algorithms that have really good use cases, and we reach for that bag of well-defined algorithms based on need, but sometimes based on things we know about how things scale, and their perfo... |
**Dave Cheney:** Yeah, to talk about algorithms - what is the meta language that we talk about algorithms, the big O notation, what is the time and complexity versus the space complexity? A linked list has better space complexity, but poor time complexity, and also in the current hardware it has even poorer time comple... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Unfortunately, that's a lot more measurable than these concepts we're talking about now, with how coupled is something - that's hard to measure. |
**Dave Cheney:** Yeah, yeah. But there's still probably an argument... You could compare a hashmap to just an array of items. For really big hashmaps and really big arrays of items, the lookup time is O(log N) versus O(n). But for really small ones, that N is really small, so it doesn't matter. These are the subtleties... |
So those are the kind of design decisions you can talk about with space and time, the big O notation. That was the thing that I wanted to get people in the Go community talking about - talk about design at a high level, rather than just posting on Reddit, "Hey, what's the fastest way of framework? What's the best HTTP?... |
**Erik St. Martin:** \[24:06\] Yeah, I'd love to see more conversations along these lines, too. I've been developing Go for a number of years and I still struggle with package layout. At what point do I split things up into separate packages? When do I make sub-packages? How we have 'io' and then 'ioutil' and things li... |
**Dave Cheney:** Yeah, the standard library is a double-edged sword. For authors like yourself, or anybody who wants to give some advice that won't change the next week, the standard library is really good, because it's gonna be the same for five or ten years. We can give this advice and know it won't be out of date so... |
That's tricky, because what is one of the three things that we tell new Go programmers? Go do the tour, go read the language spec, go read the standard library. That's not as clear a guidance as I think we'd like. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Well, some of the problems with the standard library is that pieces of that code were written before we knew what good Go code design look like. It evolved with design, and we - the Go community - didn't take the time to go back and change those things in the standard library, for various reasons. S... |
**Dave Cheney:** Yes, absolutely. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yes, and how you talk about things changing and evolving was based on what we knew at that time. One of those things that you've been also doing talks about and advocating is error-handling. I think before we shift over into that, we should probably break really quick to do a shout out to our spons... |
**Dave Cheney:** Okay, cool. |
**Break:** \[\\00:26:43.01\] |
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