Why I still write Go

Placeholder copy — stand-in essay.

Every year or so I try something else for a backend, get halfway, and come back. Not because the alternatives are bad — because the boring parts of Go are boring in exactly the places I want them to be.

The parts that matter at 2am

• One binary. The deploy is a file and a restart
• The standard library covers more than I expect, every time
• Errors are annoying to write and easy to read six months later
• Nothing clever is happening while I am asleep

func main() {
    srv := newServer()
    log.Fatal(srv.ListenAndServe())
}

I do not think Go is the best language. I think it is the one where my 2am self and my Tuesday-afternoon self write roughly the same code.

Where it stops

Anything with a user interface, obviously. Anything where the data shape changes every week. And the things I do for fun, where being slightly annoying to write is the entire appeal — that is what the Rust folder is for.