🍯🍎 It's Rosh Hashana! (Replay) John Arundel's advice for those who aren't enjoying Go so much

Good morning, everyone. This is Shay with a quick, midweek update. So don't worry, nothing critical happened in the Go world, but this week it's Rosh Hashanah. Happy New Year everybody, and we'll probably take this week's episode off. So to not leave you hanging, here's a re release of, an old interview we already did. Hope you enjoy it.

Hey, Shay. I'm trying to write the the show notes for this episode, but I can't find the password. Do you have the password for the website?

Try a.

Okay.

Try No.

That didn't work. B. B. No. I don't think it's long enough.

Try c.

C. No.

If only someone here on the call was an expert in fuzzing. Oh, hi, John.

Hello. I I'm not an expert in fuzzing, but maybe I can help you find one.

I think you're more of an expert than shy, so that's probably all we need to be.

And then I've written a fuzz test. So Oh. Yeah. So I

make the

best decision.

That's 100% more than I've written. An infinite percent more than I've written. So, John, tell us who you are and a little bit about what you do.

I'm John Arendel. I'm a a writer of books, including Go books. And I also teach Go. I also write Go programs. But I don't get paid for that.

Oh. If you remember, a few shows ago, you mentioned and recommended John's articles about fast testing, which you're writing right now. Right? You have, like, 2 out of, 4, if I remember correctly.

Yeah. You were more than kind about the articles, which was really just,

you know,

one of these things where you think this is a super neat feature of Go that not many people seem to know about. I must tell the world. Mhmm.

And we're already at 3 out of 4, and I'm really, really excited about number 4. The first one was random testing, and then fuzz test, and then writing a Go fast target, and finally, it's about finding bugs.

Well, don't build it up too much. It's not that exciting. It is it's slightly exciting.

It's worth reading. It's worth reading. I don't wanna outlive it too much. So if you're a long time listener, you maybe remember we mentioned, these articles, and here we have the writer. So welcome, John.

Thank you. That's so kind. And I don't want to, you know, make too much of it. I didn't invent fuzzing or implement it in Go or anything like that. But I found out about it and I feel I have a mission to tell the world about neat stuff.

That's cool. I'm curious. You said that you teach Go. Do you do that online or in person or self paced courses? How do you teach Go?

Yeah. Private lessons online, and I also have a course.

Okay.

Do you work with companies? Let's say I wanna take my r and d group and, you know, let's say move them from Python to Go.

Yeah. Absolutely. I'd be all over that.

Nice. I wanted to ask you about the name of your site. So, obviously, if you wanna read, John's articles or check out his books or any of these kind of things, reach out to him. I think your main site is bitfieldconsulting.com. Right?

That's the one.

That's a really good name. Like, it sticks in my head, but what's the story behind it? Bitfield Consulting. So the consulting part is easy.

Yeah. I I used to be a consultant for a while, and I I wanted a name that was something consulting, you know, to get that across. And I could have used my name, but that's kind of boring. So thought it'd be nice if it was a computery word, but also kinda sounds like a name. Right? It could be mister Bitfield.

Oh, man.

You never know. I mean, that would be a neat name if you're a IT consultant.

Mister it sounds sort of like a James Bond, mister Bitfield.

Yeah. Tragically, I found out somebody else had the same idea before me and they got the bitfield.com domain. So shame about that. But I'm sure their services are equally good.

One thing I wanted to ask before we dive deep into, you know, how you teach Go and what experiences you've had there is one more thing about the site. You have a ton of really, really, cool icons. Who's doing the the art?

Oh, it's, there's a really nice repo of Go for Clip art by an article, Marie Lettr, I think is the name. You you'll find that if you Google for Go for clip art or something like that. It's really, really high res PNG images and SVGs. So I see a few people using those in the community, but I'm really keen on them, and they make me look great. You know, I I had no input whatsoever into the design of those images, but they're beautiful.

Oh, there's even a Star Trek one. That fits the theme of my, my clip art.

I like that. Yeah. And it does sorry. It it does sort of fit, you know, the idea that I'd like to put across that sort of, you know, some of this material that I'm writing about is a little bit dry maybe, but we can try and make it fun. I mean, I think that's that's the best way to learn, isn't it? We learn the easiest when stuff is interesting and fun.

I wanna, you know, start leading you down a a track of questions about what's it like teaching Go. But let's start really at the top. Let's say I wanna learn, Go. Most people come to you, I assume, are not complete juniors. Right? Most people you work with already have experience in software development. Right?

Oh, I think it's a mix. I mean, some people have lots of experience in other languages maybe, but just not in Go. Some people have lots of experience in Go, but they still feel like there's more to learn. Sure we all feel like that. And other people just have no experience of any kind of programming at all, but think it's fun and want to try it. So that's great. I like those people the best.

We've talked a lot about whether Go should be the first language someone learns or always the second language. And we've had various opinions on it. We've had, Matt from, boot. Dev, who's also teaching Go, but doing it really in an online course with like game y sort of thing, hold the opinion that Go shouldn't be the first language, I think. And we've had some people on our Slack, I think it's one of the first conversations we had, who were like, Go is such a good language.

That's such a great question. I think I like the implied idea in the question that whether or not it's the first language you learn, Go should not be the last language. There is a lot of value in knowing more than one language. Right? I mean, that's valuable in itself no matter what that set of languages is.

Mhmm.

Although, you know, I think I've given this advice sometimes to people who say, you know, what are the 10 languages that I should learn? They say, well, it's it's nice to have some experience, some exposure to lots of different popular languages. But it's also worth diving deep, I think, into 1 really deeply, isn't it? Or or 2 if you can, but most of us are busy people, so it's hard enough just to do a deep dive into 1. Mhmm.

It's also very circumferential. Right? Like, if you have a friend that's your gateway into programming and that friend knows, I don't know, Python really well or PHP really well. It doesn't matter what language you wanna learn. You should probably learn this language because, you know, the friend, I don't know, your roommate or whatever, they can help you.

Yeah. Exactly. And I think it's also about what kind of mind you have, isn't it? You know, some languages are better suited to certain minds than others. I know people who are highly intelligent, but just for whatever reason, Go doesn't seem to suit them, doesn't think the way they do, you know. Mhmm. So they're not productive with it. So that's fine. They they should use the language that they like.

Yeah. Go definitely has, needs to click before you start, really working with it.

Yeah. I think that's right. And you can correct me on this, but I sort of get the impression from people I talk to and certainly from myself that most people's first glimpse of Go, their opinion is probably not that favorite, especially if they're used to other languages. Like, when I when I first saw it, it looked always wanna look at some code, don't you, rather than read the publicity stuff. And I looked at the code, and I thought, oh, that's ugly.

I haven't used Ruby extensively, so no, I don't know that.

Well, whatever way of writing programs appeals to you, you know, object oriented, imperative, modular, whatever, you can do that in Ruby, you know. It's so protein, you can kinda do anything with it. Go is definitely not like that, right? We can all agree.

It's very opinionated. That's right.

Yeah. That's but the thing is it has all the right opinions.

I think that when you first look at Go, it really depends what's your entry point. If you're looking at Go from a curious perspective, you just wanna learn something cool, I think it's not as attractive as other options today. Like when you start learning Go, a lot of Go people are about fundamentals. You don't have to import a ton of libraries. The all the standard tutorials are not about frameworks and libraries, and, you know, getting huge projects off the ground with tons of, files and decisions already made for you.

Very true. Very true. And I've actually had this experience, you know, training a group of corporate developers. You know, the message from the boss is, company switching to Go. Can you please help train our devs? Certainly. No problem. So I was sort of introducing myself to the group. I would go around and ask people who they are. I say, you know, why are you interested in learning Go?

Why do you wanna learn Go? I like eating.

Yeah. I was kind of thinking to myself, boy, tough room. Yeah. But there it is. But whether it should be the first language that you learn, to get back to your question, I I'm not sure.

I can imagine. Yeah.

Pointers is gonna come up.

Mhmm.

Certainly concurrency. And even things like structs and methods and so forth can, like these are fundamental, but if they're not present in the language that you come from, if you're if you're not used to programming, it's it's really hard. Right? It's tough to put yourself in the mindset of someone who doesn't know that stuff, But that's exactly what teaching is, I suppose. Mhmm.

I'm curious, John. How did you get introduced into Go, and how long ago was that? What was that story like?

Oh, that's a good one. I think, you know, I've been programming basically forever, but a lot longer than many of your listeners have been alive, I'm sure. And

And some of the interviewers as well. Yeah.

When Go was announced, I looked at it, thought that looks ugly, and it's from Google, so no thanks. Yeah. And, you know, that's that's my usual hot take on most new languages. It's probably equally bad, you know, clearly that was a wrong take. And I'm sure I'm wrong about lots of other things, but it it hasn't come back to bite me, so but I was working as a consultant with a company who switched to Go, a few years ago.

Right. Right.

And, I never stop. Okay.

So that

you know, and I had a really tough time. I don't know whether you did when you first tried to write co programs, but I think most people find it.

I certainly had a hard time with certain aspects of it for sure. Yeah. I mean, I came from Pearl primarily. And so, you know, the idea of I was using the empty interface everywhere because I didn't know how to think in the right terms, you know, in Go Go Away. Because in Perl, everything's a manageable type. It's just a thing.

I want dynamic typing. Yeah. Let's just make everything empty interface. That'll make my programs much clearer.

Yeah. I'm glad I don't do that anymore, but that was one of the first mistakes. And then trying to to wrap my head around the idea of, composition instead of inheritance took a while. And and I see that all the time. Anybody who's learned classical object oriented programming, regardless of the language, they have that problem with Go all the time.

Yeah. For sure.

I came in from the other side. I started working with Go as a team leader. And in the army, you know, you're talking about consultants needing to sound authoritative. Imagine getting a a team of 10 developers that you you're commanding. You haven't used Go before. You haven't written a web server before and now you're commanding the team.

Right.

That was rough. I was, like, trying to understand, what I was reading and making decisions. Luckily, the team itself, they were super gracious about it and they taught me everything I needed to know really fast. So my experience with Go was of an initial embarrassment. I came from a, like, CC plus plus background.

Yeah.

And I figured that it's just like writing code, like business logic and then making value and stuff like that.

Exactly. I mean, I think maybe it's a big advantage in some sense if you're not sort of a computer science professor and you know all about the theory of programming language design and so forth. Because if you did, you'd you'd be upset with Go thinking, where is everything? Right? That's all the good stuff we've been writing papers about for the last 30 years. They seem to have left it out. Maybe they just didn't read the literature. Yeah.

I highly doubt they didn't. They did read it

and they didn't like it. So they said, we're not having that.

So you you said that you used to be a consultant. I guess that's in the past now. Is teaching and writing about Go your full time job at this point? Yeah.

Well, I think I found that the most the part of the consulting that I always enjoyed most I mean, I'm the kind of guy who likes to fix problems. I'm sure. We all are. That's how we got into this. And I found the most enjoyable part of the consulting was sort of teaching people how to fix stuff themselves.

And I guess it's working well for you. So that nice to have a success story.

Yeah. I still really enjoy it. It's so much fun. You know? I I realized after a while, there's only so much you know, there's only one of me. I can't sort of can't teach everybody. So if I want to reach more people, I'd better write a book. So that's why I did that.

And now you have many of them.

Yeah. You did that 7 times. Yeah.

But this it it actually works really well because as you know when you've tried to teach go to people or help them solve problems, you sort of need to find the right way of phrasing something, don't you? Like, with each individual person, there's some kind of idea or form of words that just helps them get it. You probably won't find that straight away. You might need to try a few different ways. I mean, I've tried a zillion ways of explaining pointers, and I still think I can explain it very well.

That's one of the reasons we started this podcast is to help each of us individually keep up to date with what's happening at Go. So forces us to learn about the Go news so that we can tell the audience what the Go news is. Yeah.

And we've had, another author on the show, Adelina Simeon. She she wrote the TDD book.

Yeah. That was wonderful.

And and she said exactly the same. She like, she was like, I started, writing it. I learned so much about testing, so much more than I thought, I I was able to share. So it's definitely the best way to learn is to teach. That's really cool.

Yeah. That's a good point. Yeah. It's a I'm

wondering why it's so highlighted for you.

Well, I know it sounds like one of these motherhood and apple pie things. Like, who doesn't think programming is fun? But as you say, VPs don't. And and, unfortunately, a lot of working programmers that

I meet

don't feel it's fun. That's partly because perhaps when I was a little kid, you know, I would play with computers and write programs in basic and things like that and just never stopped doing that, really. So it started as fun for me and, thankfully, has never stopped me. But there's a lot of people, I think they just see it as, you know, it's a it's a decent career, well paid, right sort of set of skills to learn, isn't it? And they they go into it, but perhaps to be careful what I say, perhaps they spend their whole life sort of programming TypeScript frameworks and things.

Fair point.

So that's why I Totally. That's why I sort of play that up in a sort of, hey, you want to remind people, hey, you know, yeah, we it's nice to get a check, but, you know, we're basically doing this because it's enjoyable. If we didn't enjoy it, that would be a real shame because you're gonna spend your life doing this stuff. So if it's not fun, I'd like and the the other the other reason to say it is, you know, perhaps some people are thinking, John must be dumb because, you know, it's not always fun programming. What if you've got some really awful bug or have some horrendous code base with no tests and you have to fix something?

Or that the original, developers didn't have fun when they started. I think a a big part of having fun when programming is is enjoying your profession. Like feeling smart, solving problems, being proud of what you build. And it's something that gets lost when you use frameworks and work in a super large company and have deadlines and you develop software that's shipped immediately and not in a box with your name on it. But if you mess up, you just ship another thing tomorrow in a SaaS model and, you know, everybody's used to getting bugs all the time.

Yeah. That's so true. I mean, we're all all working with constraints, aren't we? But the the thing is so so the thing, if if you come in with the attitude, like, this is I'm doing a fun creative thing, this is enjoyable, and I'm good at it, you can have fun within those constraints.

You know, you

can still do a good job even if you feel you're being rushed or pressured or stressed or whatever. You can just say, well, let's push back on that for a moment and just say, given the time, scope, etcetera that I have, what's the best job I can do?

So, John, we've talked about beginning with Go. We talked about making Go fun, programming fun in general. What advice would you have to somebody who's maybe thinking about going this route? I mean, our listeners probably are trying Go, but some of them might not be enjoying it or they're struggling with it. What advice would you have for these people? How can they maybe get over that hump?

Oh, nice question. I think I'll tell them the same thing that I suggest to my students, which is the way best way to learn is by writing some programs. The best way to do that is have some program that you want or are interested in. Maybe it's some subject area that you think is cool, like cryptography or networking or databases or whatever, but you you can think of something that you could write in that space. Just try to do it.

Nice. Good advice.

Yeah. There are many interesting side projects that, people can take. I know that Jonathan and I often recommend, doing things that all 3 of us are doing on this, call, which is content creation, writing a blog. We really, really, really encourage you. If you if you listen to the other John's advice right now and you're wondering, what should I do?

Yeah. That's such great advice. And also, you know, please don't wait until you feel like you're an expert in the subject before you're allowed to blog about it. I certainly have not. And if I Yeah. If I ever become an expert, I'll let you know. But please please learn in public because that is actually the most valuable kind of content for people who are learning. Just see what puzzles other people and how they solved it. Right?

Yeah. I think our listeners don't know, but probably Filippo knows. Filippo, our editor, knows it very well where we we'll have, like, a new library coming out or a new version of Go. And we manage these news in, like, we have a Trello board where we manage all the things and we assign that this one's, this news item Jonathan is doing, this news item I am doing. And usually it's the other way around.

It's a lot

of effort. Yep.

Yeah. So we added these parts out.

It's reassuring, and I've also found when pairing with my students that usually they drive, you know, and I'll sort of keep it from the sidelines. But it's it's nice for me to drive sometimes because they see me making a ton of mistakes, You know, I I forget things in the standard library or or get compile errors or make typos and things. And I think they see that and feel a bit more relaxed because they're like, hey, that guy knows what he's doing and he's making mistakes. I'm operating at the same level as he is. That's terrific.

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

We all have only 24 hours and, you know, 10 10, fingers to click on the keyboard. All programmers. We we have the same constraints. Great. So coming to a close here, we usually have 2 questions that we ask every interviewee and we would love to pick your brains about it as well. Let's say gun to your head, you have to remove a feature from Go. What would it be?

Yeah. This is a nice one. I I carefully listened to all your previous episodes, so I wouldn't say anything that somebody else said. But Nice. I actually think I could probably dispense with quite a few things in Go. You you've probably seen it. Matt Ryan did a great talk on I think it was things I never use in Go. On YouTube. You can find it. And among those were at least 4 of the keywords and a few other things.

Yep. Yep. Never.

But, I mean, need needless to say, I don't use Go to. There's not

Mhmm.

Not much call for that. There are 1 or 2, times if you read the standard library code and the Go runtime code and the compiler, which I definitely recommend. I mean, this this is a fun recreation, as long as no one's gonna quiz you on it, you know. You just read it for enjoyment. You sometimes see Go to use, and then also the stuff and figure out, like, obviously, they know what they're doing.

Yeah. I always thought about the the Walrus operator as more of a branding move than a computer science move. It's like the first thing you need to do usually in programming, you know, tutorials, it's hello world. Right? And then you put the hello in a in a variable and you print that, and then you're like, oh, Go has the waters operators. Okay. That's how this language is different.

Yeah. I mean, I absolutely love it because I would be super annoyed to have to write fast and such equals every time. You know? That's no fun.

Mhmm.

But at the same time, it it just this happens a lot, doesn't it? That something that seems like a really nice free extra bonus feature just introduces confusion because now there's 2 ways to do it. People say, well, should I use colon equals, or should I use var or whatever? And now you have to know about that. And the other thing is anytime you get some really weird, really horrible bug in your Go program, it's probably either due to a channel, right, or a or a deadlock or it's some something to do with the Walrus operator having shadowed some other variable inside the loop or something.

Yep. When you defer a thing and you up you declared it in one way. We we covered something recently. I think it was time since. You shouldn't defer the time since things.

Right.

It's, I think that the fact that, you get these bugs in Go is maybe more of a achievement of the language than a Yeah. I mean a drop because you wouldn't even get to these bugs so fast in, in, languages in in other languages, at least in my experience.

Oh, definitely. I mean, you can make too much of this, can't you? You can say, oh, there's a there's a construct in Go that allows you to write bad programs. Shock horror. You know, thank goodness no other languages have those.

Yeah. So you pretty much, covered the entire field for the rest of our interviews because you said everything in every single book, should stay. And other than these, tons of features, so all our next interviews, all they have to do is either agree or disagree

with you.

But here's a more open ended one. If you could, copy feature from a different language, and put it into Go, what would the feature library, I don't know, community thing, whatever, what would that be?

Yeah. That's a great question. You know, I I definitely think there's scope for multiple languages as we started out by saying, isn't there? Because some languages, the philosophy is let's put everything in and then people can just use the bits they like, c plus plus, other languages, or a small group of languages, but Go is one of them, isn't it? The designers evidently felt, let's take away everything we can until there's just enough left to be able to write useful programs.

Yeah. Good answer. Nothing. Nice answer. Cool. Well, John, it has been a pleasure having you on. I read your book, several months ago. It's nice to finally meet you. So thanks for coming on. Thanks for sharing your wisdom with our listeners. How can people, just one last time, how can people reach out to you if they're interested in, in getting in contact?

Just go to bitfield.bitfieldconsulting.com, and you'll find me.

Perfect.

Thank you so much for having me.

Thank you.

Thanks a lot. See you

all next time. A big thanks to John for coming on the show.

Thanks, John.

I first became aware of John when I was reviewing books for GoBeginners. I had scoured Amazon, and his books weren't there. And the reason is because they're self published. So one of my readers or or watchers, I published on YouTube and, on my blog pointed me to his book. So I checked out his books and they were great. And and especially if you're beginner to programming in general, his book for Love

A Go is a is

a great book, and he's a fun guy to talk to, very knowledgeable, and has some some great insights to share with us. So thanks, John, for coming on, and thanks for everything you're doing for the Go community in general, and just the programming community even in a larger sense. So really appreciate that. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us today.

Yeah. We need more friendly people like John in the in the industry. I really recommend checking out

his,

Twitter, his LinkedIn and whatever and specifically, you know, drop into bitfieldconsulting.com, grab an article and read it, they're all good. And I'm sitting on the edge of my seat here. Well, actually that's a lie. Jonathan knows that I have a standing desk so I'm standing. But but I'm standing on the on the tip of some of my toes here, waiting for his final, fuzzing vlog.

Very good.

Thanks a lot, John.

Talk to you all next week. Have a great week.

Bye.