All these things are available for Java (MVN/Gradle, JUnit, IDEA, YourKit, etc) but having one right way to do them built in is pretty great.
On a meta level, combination of the AST package and deterministic code formatting means it's relatively easy to write programs that manipulate source code.
> All these things are available for Java (MVN/Gradle, JUnit, IDEA, YourKit, etc) but having one right way to do them built in is pretty great.
It's great if you're just starting out, but it's irrelevant in the long run. It can even be harmful when it's coupled with the language, as you get things like having the packaging tool become deprecated, like with go dep, since a 3rd party tool can't compete with a first party tool for adoption, especially in a relatively young language like Go.
For pprof vs VisualVM - I haven't yet done a lot of CPU profiling with them, but for memory I have had the exact opposite experience. VisualVM and Eclipse MAT are much easier to understand and have much more functionality for analyzing the memory of a Java process than pprof offers.
Not sure what (pseudo-)deterministic code formatting has to do with the ease of manipulating program code, but having a built-in AST package is indeed a good idea. Too bad it hasn't been used to write any useful refactoring tools for Go (outside of JetBrains Goland? Haven't tried that yet). I have heard that Google uses go fix recipes to make modifications across their code base, but haven't seen any examples, and I doubt it can realistically be done in a code base that is not ridiculously well tested, and that it didn't require any manual intervention in a few corner cases in Google as well (assuming they did more than a rename).
I’ve written a a few, all internal sadly. Deterministic formatting is important because you can manipulate the AST and then just call “print” and get a nice diff. Without that it would rewrite entire files.
Ok. But you get to stop discussing some style choices, and instead you lose a decent debugger, a decent (open source) IDE, any graphical profiler, good package management that is separate from your source control tool, and probably a few others I'm missing.
And if you care about style trivialities ,you'll still need an external linter, since go fmt doesn't enforce anything about variable names , line length, function length, comment placement, line breaking and many other things some people like to obsess over.
The beauty of Go is that it's so simple that you don't need a debugger. Do you need a word dictionary to read this comment? No, because this comment is simple. Same with Go. But if you need a debugger, there is Delve [1], though I only used it once to debug a dynamic programming algorithm.
I know about delve, but it's an extremely basic debugger. You can't even pause program execution on demand or execute an arbitrary function while stopped at a breakpoint.
Beyond that, the complexity of a language has nothing to do with how much you need a debugger. If you are writing a complex program, you sometimes need a debugger to quickly figure out what is going wrong, instead of endless theory -> change/log -> rerun cycles.
> Beyond that, the complexity of a language has nothing to do with how much you need a debugger
I disagree. There is a higher chance you need a debugger when trying to understand, say, Scala code versus Go.
> If you are writing a complex program [...]
Complexity of a program depends on its author. Even a stupid simple function can get complex if the programmer is less experienced. Go has a philosophy to simplify things. The community tries to follow this philosophy as much as possible, which is why a lot of Go code is easy to read regardless of how complex the logic is.
In the majority of cases, a need for Go debugger means you are dealing with bad written code. Heck, this idea can be extended to pretty much any language.
I think the general agreement is that there exists essential complexity - the complexity of the problem domain you are trying to solve - and accidental complexity - extra complexity introduced into code code by the tooling or by shoddy design.
Simple code often doesn't need a debugger to be understood. Complex code sometimes does. But code can be complex simply because the problem domain is complex.
Also, a simple tool can very well introduce accidental complexity than a more flexible (and therefore complex) tool. Go is famous for doing so with many of its design choices.
A very good example is if you want to perform a set union of two collections. In many languages, you could simply create a set from each collection and then run the union operation on them. In Go, the easiest way to achieve the same is to use maps and rely on the fact that the keys of a map happen to form a set, while ignoring the value part of the map entirely. This is not only inelegant, it is also unintuitive and it wastes memory, but is at least slightly less complex than writing a set data type for your struct by hand.
Yes, things should be written in a simple way, but excusing the issues with the program with "Well, the developer should have written it simpler" does not resolve the problem, just shifts the blame.
Also, even though there is no default built in unit test framework in Java and C#, it would be hard to claim JUnit and NUnit aren't essentially that. Ditto for log4j in Java.
By the way, I'm not sure you can claim to have a logging framework in your language when it can't even differentiate between debug messages, info and error messages. I'm not sure there is any significant project that can rely on Go log that couldn't as easily use stderr/stdout.
To be fair, all languages that have not had modules built in suffer from this to some extent or another. The main good part about Java is that they have compatibility between code using modules and code that doesn't.
