🏕️ BIG questions: "Is excel immortal?" and "Is Go the right choice for my startup?"

Show is sponsored by you, our listener. Stick around till after the news to hear more about that. This is Cup of Go for October 18, 2024. Keep up to date with the important happenings in the Go community in about 15 minutes per week. I'm Jonathan Hall.

And I'm Shay Nehmad.

Hello, Shay.

Hello. I am very much dreading the the date tomorrow.

Why is that?

It is my 30th birthday, and it's just too round of a date for me to not worry about bugs. Like, is it actually my 30th, or did we miscount a year because of a leap day? Then you start reading about leap seconds, time zones, the government, in Israel changed the, you know, the, like, daylight saving times, a couple of times over the last 30 years. I'm wondering if it is my 30th or is it just a misconception. So, yeah, I'm worried about dates because I'm a programmer.

Yeah. So today, we're gonna talk about a couple, meetups, some proposals and blog posts. We don't have a whole lot of, like, hard news, but we're gonna we're gonna still talk about what's happening in the Go community.

Hard news like we usually We usually have the deep break. Politics, the economics of GoLandia. Exactly. No. No. That's not us. Let's nitpick about, Linter choices for for a little while.

Let's do it. So, yeah. As you mentioned, con they're not really conferences, but but meetups. A couple that came onto my radar, if you're in Dubai and, who doesn't wanna be in Dubai? It's a beautiful city. The, the first apparently, ever go UAE meetup is happening on the 26th.

Oh, cool.

I'll have a link to that in the show notes.

I can just imagine it happening on like, a 50 story golden building. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Yeah. Send us pictures of the event. We wanna see, how how flashy the venue was.

Emirates Tower. That sounds fancy

for sure. Yeah.

Well, I'm really down for the 1st meetup of a city. That's very, very cool. Guev and Rashid, let us know how it goes. And if you're going, let us know how it went.

Yeah. Please.

The topics, by the way, you said this is a meetup, but the topic list is long enough to, at least for me to say, conference. There are, like, 5 talks. Usually, for me, meetup is, like, talk, a little bit of pizza, talk, and then you're you're gone. Right? Mhmm. Like a 2 hour evening engagement?

Usually, yeah.

But this sounds like a serious thing. It is lightning talks, when you read into the agenda. Every single one is 15 minutes, which I think is a better bang for your buck. Like, most people are not good enough speakers to hold the conversation for over 15 minutes, which is why that's the limit for our news.

And I have to say the 15 minute lightning talk. That's that's good if you're gonna do if you're gonna do just lightning talks at the meetup in Amsterdam, where I'm no longer a organizer. Lightning talks usually 5 minutes. So, yeah, 15 minutes is great for 5 talks. You're gonna get a lot of information for your time. Go go to the 1st meetup in Dubai.

Cool. Cool. Cool.

And, we also have another meetup, coming up in Leipzig, Germany. This is the one I would I would have loved to attended. I I have a friend in Leipzig. I've been there a few times. I've I've missed their one of their meetups by, I think, a day.

Yeah. I think it's, very, very cool to the package that they're gonna talk about. Like, test coverage, I don't know. To me, it always feels like just a chore. Mhmm.

Cool.

I guess, if you haven't run into it, you'd be like, why?

Mhmm.

But if you have, run into flaky tests that relate to threads and things like that Oh, yeah. Like, go routines Yeah. You'd love to hear about it. And it's actually super non like, it's a super new thing, last week. Looks like, released for the talk kind of thing.

Oh, that's cool. Honestly.

Yeah. Yeah. But I'm down. I've started. Keep working on it. We love these sorts of things. Yep.

Awesome. That's all I have for our conferences and meetups for now. If you if you're listening and you know of one coming up, let us know so we can include it in the show. Let's move on to, a proposal.

There are no proposal minutes from the last 2 weeks, which is totally fine. Summarizing meetings is annoying. We totally get it. There is one, proposal who that we wanted to mention that's in its final comment period and I think it's relevant for people to comment if it affects them. What do you think about HTTP codes? I think they're a great invention.

They're a blunt instrument but they're they're good. Yeah.

They're just, like, very pragmatic enough. Right? 200 means everything okay. 300 means you gotta look for it somewhere else. 400, it's your fault. 500, it's my fault. Like, very easy. What are 100? 100. Like, onexx.

Yeah. Those are those are for continuation, aren't they? They're not commonly used, but

They're they're very much not commonly used to the point where I almost don't remember them, by heart. I do try to make a point of remembering HUP codes by heart just because they forced me to learn it by heart in the army. Mhmm. But other than that, there's literally no reason to remember the 100 ones. It's interim responses.

It sounds like a a Reddit troll.

So so, actually, it is Roy Fiddly Right. Who, like, is the person behind the Apache license and Apache H CPD. It's like

principal author of the HTTP stack, inventor of rest.

Yeah. Yeah. So it is a bug in the Go client. And there's a bunch of the discussion here about, how to fix it, in the future, What other HTTP clients, libraries are doing. Because if you do like infinite, you're suddenly opening yourself up to slow loris attacks where someone can send you very slow, very continuous drip of 100 and DDoS your server with just a bunch of, 100 Mhmm.

With with comments from Russ Cox like, do you have a concrete proposal for a new API here? You you know this isn't just a quick fix. There's there's a lot of thought going into it. And it like you said, it's probably a breaking change.

By the way, if any security researchers are listening, it's not just if you're a user of this, like very niche, HTTP code, and part of the spec. Also, if you're looking to make a name for yourself and find some vulnerabilities, there are, like, 5 here. I'm not even there are 5. Just, for sure. 1 for each arbitrary number.

There's an arbitrary number of 5, but, yeah, there's 5.

Yeah. I'm I'm just sure that there's more, like, vulnerabilities in the implementation here. Getting HTTP spec right on the first try and on the second try is very, very difficult. So just an interesting proposal if you're into networking or HP and things like that, check it out. Other than that, we just have some community things going on. Right?

We do. This could be a big topic. It came up on my Reddit radar, which was working this week for the first time in months. And I I don't know. It's it's more a discussion topic.

That has that has more problems. So it's not that it's boring to develop these boring lines of code. Well, I I don't think I need to voice my opinion. I was the VPRA in the dev of a startup, and we used Go. Mhmm. Like, the the proof is in the pudding. And it's still, like, as far as I know, it's still going, strong. But language is just a tool. Right? We used Go for the back end where like, microservice back end where it made sense.

Yes. And that's gonna that was gonna be my main point is if this is really just a CRUD app, you can probably find a SaaS that will do it for you. Put your point, put something in your database schema and do a little bit of configuration and you're gonna have something that does 90% of what you need if it truly is just crud. And there's something that will even make user facing interfaces to do that. I don't have names on the top of my head, but I've seen some.

So I'm not I'm not sure I'm I'm that far ahead. Mhmm. I like, you could use code because it's it might be easier. It's less vendor locked in things like that, but you still 95% of the code can be auto generated. And let's, like, remember when you're using a language like TypeScript or Go, 99% of the code real code, quote unquote, right, machine code is auto generated anyway.

I agree. So that's why I was saying, like, if you're never gonna do more than CRUD, then I would consider that. If you expect your application to grow to the point where you are doing something more complex, then it probably is worth building the code whether it's auto generated or or otherwise, you're doing in a language that you customize. And at that point, I pretty much agree with everything you said about which languages to choose or which ones to rule out and like the language isn't the biggest, it's not the biggest decision. Whether you use Ruby or PHP or Python or Go or Java or whatever.

So the the poster on Reddit was like, I'm a solo dev. When you're a solo developer, at least for me, using, Go does have a outsized benefit. Because when you're in a team, I think mistakes are a bit harder to go through the filter. Right? Someone reviews your code.

So I have a question for the audience if you wanna come talk about it on the, the Caprica Slack channel. When would you absolutely not use Go in your startup? What what circumstances would would make that, make Go a no go for you if you're if you're doing a startup? Or maybe it maybe that's been your situation. Come talk about it on the Slack channel.

The the speed of iteration, again, is is the most important part, I think. There are some actually good insights here in, threads. Like, people suggesting specific tools and dealing with JSON correctly. There is one post here that I really, really liked, which is you spend way too much energy, like, analyzing which platform, which language, like, what's gonna be difficult, what's gonna be correct, does it have enterprise problems, is it does it have a great community? Someone posted that Golang isn't always great at getting getting them into an inspired zone because it's a bit mechanical and repetitive.

Interesting. Alright.

So I don't know. That's interesting. It ends up being a just a dump startup after all that discussion. It's Uber for cats. Woo hoo. And Uber is in Go. So hey.

It's not entirely Go, is it? I know they use Go.

But

they I know they use Go. Yeah. Alright. Well, we, had some good discussions. Let's, round out the episode with a lightning round, with some new projects to talk about.

Lightning round. First up, do you know the loop var bug? If you don't remember it, that's great because it doesn't exist in Go anymore, and you don't have to worry about it. But, yep. There's a linter called copy loop var which was there and is you can still get it from, GoVet or Golangci lint and a member of our show, well, member of our show, member of our channel, at this point they're basically a co host with the amount of content they're writing in the, in the channel, Peter Aronoff submitted an issue about the copy loop var thing.

Alright, I want to talk about a tool I use and I've actually submitted a pull request for. It's called PSQL wire. We talked about databases earlier in the show. PSQL wire is a library written in go that speaks the Postgres wire protocol. Most of it. So if you need to either speak to a Postgres, server directly without going through LibQ or something like that, or you want to implement your own, Postgres speaking server, you can go. This is the library for you. Check it out.

You didn't end up using it though. Right?

I didn't end up using it the way I was intending to but I have another project I will be using it for.

Mentioning talking to databases, let's talk to the most immortal database of all, Excel. If you are a person with a computer, you probably know what Excel is, and if you're listening to the show, you probably know Go. So you can probably do 1+1 and figure out what ExcelICE is about but it's not gonna work because we forgot to put the equal sign before. So it's just writing 1+1 in the cell now. How annoying is that?

American Democracy? That one's easy. That doesn't even exist in 2024.

And Microsoft Excel. So I don't know. It it's a very good, article. I suggest you read it just because it's interesting. Cool. And that does it for our show today. Stick around for a quick ad break. Like John mentioned at the beginning of the show, this show is supported by you. If you wanna support us in the most direct way, please subscribe to our Patreon as a member and give us $8 a month. This is a pretty expensive hobby.

The new cup with the black interior. Right?

Yeah. That looks good. I don't have that one.

It looks I don't know. Yeah. I wouldn't need to get one.

Yep. Looks dope. Actually, for you, shipping is gonna be really cheap as well. But it doesn't matter because when you buy off our shop, shipping is included. Woo hoo. Well, woo hoo. I don't know. We decided that at the beginning because I didn't wanna mess with shipping and then some orders we lose money on it, like anyway, whatever. Whatever. Get the cups.

There you go.

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Program exited. Goodbye.