🇰🇪 yield(RC2, 1st GopherCon in Africa, LLMs, Dreams of code, and more)

This show is supported by you. Stick around till the ad break to hear more. This is CapaGo for July 1920 20 20 4. Keep up to date with the important happenings in the Go community in about 15 minutes per week. I'm Shay Nehmad.

And I'm Jonathan Hall.

Welcome to release candidate 2. Yay. Go 123 is, moving forward. As usually happens in these sort of times, we're read a bit less focused on new proposals and new things, and everybody's just trying to fix every tiny little bug or typo to make sure that the release is great. So obviously, we don't have proposal news for you this week.

Mhmm.

And there's a specific, merge list you can take a look at that shows what went into the release branch, what went into go 123. So there's, like, 70 fixes here.

Between r c one and r c 2, you've been. Right? Yes. Okay.

And one of them is, Jonathan's fix.

Woah. What did I fix?

A typo and a comment? Okay.

Sounds like the kind of thing I might do.

So, in database SQL driver actually, now that you're the contributor, do you say SQL? That's all the

I I I don't say it out loud. It's a a word that I will not speak. I only type it.

It's an ancient language. Anyway, there are a lot of fixes here, which when I opened this patch set I was very surprised. I was sure like, oh, it's just 1 or 2 tiny things but I think many of them are more close to your change, like, fix comments and improve error messages, and very very, small edge cases, you know, looking at just the commit, messages here. Right? Make struct comments match struct names.

Mhmm. So are you doing that, Shy? Are you running RC 2 in in CI?

No. Not yet. Not yet. But I will. I definitely will. I we're working on, centralizing CI, workflows right now at work. We're setting up a Backstage. Right? Spotify Backstage to, like, maintain all this self serve stuff. So I wanna move some, workflows there, and then I'll do it. We actually have a small Go script in the Backstage implementation. So I might do it there because that's very low stakes.

Cool. I installed RC one on my local machine yesterday, or 2 days ago, actually. What's I'm talking about in a few minutes? And I have RC 2 running in CI on one of my projects.

And how's it working?

No problem so far. Damn. Well, I I should say, actually, it it causes Golang CI Lint to crash.

What?

So Golang CI Lint needs to be updated. I don't know what it is, but it it crashes when I'm running, either RC 1 or RC 2.

Alright. So report the bugs Yeah. To the relevant teams, to make sure that when the full release is out, right, everybody can enjoy it.

That's right.

What are you doing on October 19th?

It's a good question. I'll probably be either in in Guatemala City or in Atlanta looking for a new house. I'm not sure yet which.

You're you'll also be celebrating my birthday.

I'll also be celebrating your birthday. But, unfortunately, I will not be in Nairobi with all these other beautiful, wonderful gophers who are attending the first ever Gopher Con Africa. Woo hoo. So the venue has not yet been announced. So stay tuned or subscribe. You know, go to their website, irobi.gophers.africa, and, sign up to be notified, I guess.

They're open for speakers?

Yeah. CFP closed just a couple of days ago. I think it closed on the day I learned of the conference. Mhmm. So, unfortunately, it's too late to be a speaker this year, but maybe next year. You can still go and meet all the wonderful golfers, October 18 19, at a TBD venue in Nairobi.

I love the pricing, where you have the regular ticket, corporate ticket, which is slightly more expensive, but also student ticket. So if you're a student, and you have a student identification card, you get in a half price, which is really good. You know, students can really use both the lectures and and the networking. Mhmm. So getting in their half price, I think is a good investment. So 18th, 19th October in Nairobi, Kenya.

And since you didn't bring it up, I'm going to. I like their logo. Their little mascot. Their their gopher warrior mascot.

Oh, I haven't even noticed. Oh, it is cute. I don't remember what was the it it's holding up the, like, traditional, vertical shield. That's pretty cool. Although, I'm not used to seeing, gophers, you know, holding up armaments. Usually, they're like, drink your coffee.

I kinda like the juxtaposition between this cute, fuzzy, durable animal and warrior gear.

Yeah. So Nairobi, October 18th 19th. Very cool. So like we said, not a lot of proposals this week. So, that we found a few interesting blog posts and just topics for discussion that people have been talking about. And the first one, was from Reddit. I think it came up like 2 weeks ago. Does Go benefit more from Copilot than other languages? And I'm gonna pull, a Jonathan here and like attack the premise of the question first. Like Jonathan is doing to many many people on, LinkedIn now and then.

I would never. I reject the premise of your statement.

I I think you're doing your work trolling enough people on LinkedIn to keep it keep it honest, Right? Which is a great service, for the rest of us. But my first, like, thought is why does it matter? Why does it matter if Go is super well fitted to, you know, LLMs or doesn't work well with it at all?

Well, I suppose it matters if you're trying to leverage an LLM, to, do your coding, help with your coding. Harvey, go downstairs.

Hello, Harvey. So, back from that break, Jonathan has to take care of his, kid. We actually got a mention on Slack. I don't remember. This is a tangent, but someone was, like, oh, it's good that you're normalizing, like, being with your kid while you're at work. And it's, like, yeah. This is a fun thing we do. This is not a huge super important corporate board meeting. Our kids can come and bother us every now and then.

Of course. They're

cute. Jonathan's kids are cute, and my and my kid is cuter. And it's just a Yeah.

I I reject the premise we hear from you, David.

So let's go back to let's go back to Copilot. LMS. Right? Why does it matter that, Copilot is more useful in language x than language y?

Alright. So answering the question, I I think I think it might matter if you're trying to get full leverage out of your LLM. But but but and this is probably where you're going. That shouldn't be the deciding factor when you're choosing a language. Right? I mean, you use the language that's best suited suited for the job. And maybe that could be one small part of that, the decision matrix, but it shouldn't be the the main thing.

So I think it's the same way that, does, Go have like, you know, Go's LSP is pretty good. Right? It's pretty fast and it has a lot of features, extract method and whatever. It certainly has more tools than some other languages you could think about. Right?

I think it depends on how you define better. I think in general, an LLM is gonna benefit the most from whatever language has the most input available. Or to be even more specific, most input that you want to replicate. If you have tons and tons of, say I'll just pick a random language. Let's say Lua.

So surprisingly, there are some features of the language that impact, like, the how good the LLM is.

Mhmm.

And it does have to do with the input data, like you said. I learned about this from, Natalie, Natalie Pistonovich from, GoTime. So in the latest, Gofer Con Israel, which was about a year ago and the next, Gofer Con Israel is coming up now. Or maybe it was 2 years ago? No.

And we don't have all those pesky, semicolons and braces to get to to take token space either.

Totally. Totally. Although, I've seen recently, new research from, I think, Facebook, like Meta, about, their buildings specialized LLMs that actually, read the language, you know, like get an AST and then do the prediction on the AST to get rid of all that noise. So I assume Copilot will get at least experimental support for that as well. Mhmm.

I don't find that to be true. I I do use it, But I find it most useful, when I'm doing something very, very repetitive. Otherwise, it just and even then, it makes a lot of mistakes. So I I don't I don't trust Copilot at all. So I always verify whatever it

gives me. Yeah. There there is this, feedback here as well. Right? Someone says, Copilot is expletive for Golang. I turned mine off. The code it generates is spectacularly subpar and some people are have concerns already as well. But I think this is again the gen like, the general, discussions are on that. Right? Oh, maybe use Claude's sonnet instead of open AI. Maybe use this instead of that. Blah blah blah.

So which other one do you use? Let us know on, on our Slack channel.

Yeah. For sure.

And if it's just the one between your shoulders, that's cool too.

So does Go benefit more from Copilot than other languages? We reject the premise of the question. Doesn't really matter. Also, Copilots are bad. Also, tabs are better than spaces.

Also, what are these range iterators?

I don't know. My copilot isn't suggesting them yet because there isn't enough data, so I'll never know.

Do do you find these new range generators to be kind of mystifying too?

Well, if only someone would demystify them for me.

If if only they well, hey, I see this post from Zach Musgraves. It claims it's gonna demystify them for us, but we should read it.

Well, how about you explain it for me in this audio format because that seems kinda like a useful use of my time.

So we we all know that Go 123 is coming up with coming out with the new Range Rover Fund. Right? We've talked about it on the show before.

A million.

We've talked about it even a year ago. The the the proposal was written just over a year ago this this week. So we talked about it. If you don't know what we're talking about, listen to the past episodes, stop living under a go rock. You can create a specially formed function with a particular signature, and the the range keyword will will iterate over it. That's that's the TLDR.

And you've been playing around with it this week a lot.

I have. Yeah. So I was curious in in in in large part due to conversation on our Slack channel, the Capacost Slack channel, with some listeners, like, how would this work? I have a library where I think it would be a perfect fit, but Saturday, I had some spare time a couple of days ago. I give it a shot, and I pulled up this post. It was an 8 minute read from Zach. And of course, I skipped through 80% of it.

To get to the code, right?

It went straight to the example code and just plagiarized it blatantly. But the TLDR, actually, so I wrote my own post as well, which links back to this one. It just is talking about my own experience with the range iterators. My TLDR is I love them now. And, most of my fears about how complex they were and the bad naming were totally overblown.

Cool. I was really worried about the new keyword.

Yeah. I was too.

But but now you say it's

fine? There is no new keyword.

What do you mean? You can say yield now. It's like Python.

There was no keyword, but if you look really closely, that's just the name of a function. That's the a callback. Yeah. That's when the light bulb hit, went on for me too. It was like, Oh, it's just a function.

And there was one interesting you know, we always, loved to hate on the name, seek 2.

Mhmm.

Right? And I think you sort of had a discussion around the naming as well. Can you name it whatever you want? Should you name it Seek 2 as well?

Yeah. So one of the points in my post was, as I did this exercise of building 5 different iterators from a project, I never once had to write seek or seek 2. So, like, fine then. I don't care what you call it then. Call it whatever you want.

So so that's that's exactly the thing. Right? Talk is cheap, but action is is expensive. We talked about how hard using the range generators and the name and blah blah blah for over an hour, and your proof of concept was already in under an hour. Yeah.

Mhmm.

That matters a whole lot more. Which is why we try to highlight people that, you know, write the blog post and write the proposals, and our opinions on it is should be a very small part of what you get out of this show.

Yeah. We don't know what we're talking about. We're just a bunch of doofuses who like to talk about Yoh.

Totally. Alright. I think it's time for our lightning round. Right?

Oh, yes. I love that.

Alright. Lightning round. First thing we wanna recommend is dreams of code new video. This CLI component was trickier to build than I thought. They built in a 17 minute super super, storytelly, beautifully shot video, a small CLI loader thing in Go.

And up on my list, introducing Quartz, a deterministic time testing library for Go by Spike Curtis. What a great name. Mhmm. So Spike decided that he doesn't like flaky tests, and I was sold Open a line, I hate flicky tests. I'm there.

We should tell dreams of code about Quartz. They would sort of improve their test as well. Finally on my list, new release for OV. OV is a terminal text viewer written in Go. Basically, it's like less or more or like watch or tail.

That was fast.

Stick around for the ad break to hear some meta stuff. Welcome to our outbreak. Thanks a lot for people who, sort of volunteer to cohost, towards the end of the summer, where we're planning to take some time off, on our Slack channel. So we'll definitely reach out to you soon and try to set that up. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot. It's really cool. If you do wanna join that list as well, just let us know on Slack, and we'll reach out to you. It's not that complicated.

We we are giving preference to those who have not co hosted before. So don't be insulted if we don't reach out to you if you've already been a co host. Yep. We love you. We're so glad you were a co host, but we wanna share the opportunity.

So if you do wanna reach us, capago.dev has all the links you need, links to stuff like past episodes, transcriptions, our email news atcapago.dev, our Slack channel, hashtag cup dashodashgo on the go for Slack. Our swag store where you can buy hoodies, shirts, the hoodie by the way, I was doubtful, but I got some for dev ops days in Amsterdam because Amsterdam is cold when I went to meet, Jonathan. And I've I have used it more than once. It's very comfortable. So where I work, Orca, they really we have 1, AC Tyrant.

Do you

have one of these as well? Like, someone who just blast this on 16? I

work from home. I work from home.

Do you blast the AC at home?

When I want to. And I don't I don't want to. Yeah.

I don't I don't have a choice. And I'm sitting right under the AC. So I brought the hoodie and it now lives on my chair, at the office which is really nice. Because nobody seals my chair as well. So here hey.

This show goes around.

That that's better. Around. Okay. Where else can you mention or or talk about the show? So we talked about, like, professional reviews on the on the apps.

So, if you want something a little lower key, a little easier to do if you're a a social media person, follow us on Twitter or dare I say X, whatever. We currently have 449 followers on Twitter. Cup_o, underscore go is the handle. If you're more of a fediverse person, I'll just say it that way. That's pretty factual without throwing value statements into it.

We're

also on Mastodon, couple ago at techhub. Social, where we currently have 72 followers. And And I also just had to look up our YouTube channel, and I was surprised to see we have 214 subscribers on YouTube, and people are actually consuming the show there. We have had 30 hours of quote, watch time on YouTube in the last month.

So I think it's, because, Google Podcasts died. Right? They killed it. Killed by Google. Hashtag killed by Google.

Yeah. And when you see if you if you follow us, when you see the thing come by in your feed, just hit that that art button, hit the reshare, and it helps spread the word.

Awesome. So thanks a lot for listening this week, everyone. Next week, hopefully, hopefully, we'll have an interview. We'll finally go get back on that horse. Really trying to schedule that.

We've been trying, and it's been a bit difficult. Everyone else is on holiday during the summer too, so it's a little bit hard to schedule during the summertime. But we'll

Yeah. Holiday with the kids, like, Jonathan just demonstrated, etcetera, etcetera. That's it for this week's program exited. Goodbye.