Learning Go

Preface

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. There’s no inheritance, no generics (yet), no aspect-oriented programming, no function overloading, and certainly no operator overloading. There’s no pattern matching, no named parameters, no exceptions. To the horror of many, there are pointers. Go’s concurrency model is unlike other languages, but it’s based on ideas from the 1970s, as is the algorithm used for its garbage collector. In short, Go feels like a throwback. And that’s 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, you’re going to be unhappy with the result and wonder what all the fuss is about. That’s 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. ...