Jon Bodner - Learning Go: An Idiomatic Approach to Real-World Go Programming

by Jon Bodner

Copyright 2021 Jon Bodner. All rights reserved.

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978-1-492-07721-3

[LSI]

My first choice for a book title was Boring Go because, properly written, Go is boring.

It might seem a bit weird to write a book on a boring topic, so I should explain. Go has a small feature set that is out of step with most other modern programming languages. Well-written Go programs tend to be straightforward and sometimes a bit repetitive. Theres no inheritance, no generics (yet), no aspect-oriented programming, no function overloading, and certainly no operator overloading. Theres no pattern matching, no named parameters, no exceptions. To the horror of many, there are pointers. Gos concurrency model is unlike other languages, but its based on ideas from the 1970s, as is the algorithm used for its garbage collector. In short, Go feels like a throwback. And thats the point.

Boring does not mean trivial. Using Go correctly requires an understanding of how its features are intended to fit together. While you can write Go code that looks like Java or Python, youre going to be unhappy with the result and wonder what all the fuss is about. Thats where this book comes in. It walks through the features of Go, explaining how to best use them to write idiomatic code that can grow.

When it comes to building things that last, being boring is great. No one wants to be the first person to drive their car over a bridge built with untested techniques that the engineer thought were cool. The modern world depends on software as much as it depends on bridges, perhaps more so. Yet many programming languages add features without thinking about their impact on the maintainability of the codebase. Go is intended for building programs that last, ones that are modified by dozens of developers over dozens of years.

Go is boring and thats fantastic. I hope this book teaches you how to build exciting projects with boring code.