Old tech
I first became interested in go when it was in beta, lured in by the promise of simplicity, I was working in C# .net and found lots of things confusing in the .net ecosystem and myriad of ways of achieving the same thing.
I bought the book and dipped in sporadically to be fair, building the odd web api and cli tools. This was ten years ago.
I recently dived back in to see if I could replicate something I built in JavaScript and refreshed my knowledge of the language. Shockingly it has barely changed and simplicity remains, it’s easy to install dependencies and run some code locally, there’s not been any fundamental changes to how things work or how you use the language, not that it’s much of a surprise given this was one of the founding tenets of the language.
As someone who started in the C# .net world and having not used it in anger during the huge changes they have went through moving to dotnet core and lots of updates to the language, it would be a little daunting diving back into using it full time.
The same reasons have drawn me to htmx, it’s built on fundamentals of the web that haven’t changed in forever, compared against how often other js frameworks are changing.
It’s refreshing to dive into go and everything is the same. Guess the creators of go got a lot right to start with.
Go has a seen somewhat of a resurgence in popularity in the last few years, I wonder if the increasing complexity of the web and cloud architecture has developers looking for simpler tools to do the job.
It got me thinking about what else has barely changed through the years. I learnt relational databases and SQL while in university and spent the best part of a year in my first job writing all sorts of SQL for reporting. It fundamentally hasn’t changed in 15 years, of course the technology has advanced and improved but I know enough to be dangerous and get the job done.
I wonder how much energy has been wasted keeping up with trends that never made the cut.
