With so many great programming languages having emerged in the last decade, many of them purpose-built, when and where does Go still make sense and how do you make the case for it at work?
Matched from the episode's transcript 👇
Johnny Boursiquot: So let’s switch up the conversation a little bit to something else that I’ve also been contemplating. In my line of work, because I have to wear many hats, I end up solving different kinds of problems, which are not always solvable with Go. Sometimes I have to switch to put on my Python hat, because I’m doing some large language model AI development work, sometimes I have to put on my – I’ve even had to write some Lua recently… Different problems call for perhaps different tools, in different languages. But I’ve found myself relying on modern tooling, by which I mean gen AI style, large language model powered chat bots, the ChatGPTs and the Copilots and everything else to help me move forward. Which - it kind of dawned on me ultimately that perhaps here too the language did not matter… In the sense that what I’m trying to accomplish is solve a problem. If solving this particular problem means I have to be in this ecosystem, I have to use Ruby on Rails to spin up a quick CRUD app, a proof of concept that basically solves that particular problem quite well, that’s a stack for it… Then I can use one of those Copilots to help me spin up this code.
Heck, last night I was – I never used Tailwind, and I needed to quickly come up with a static website, and I’m like “Hey, you know what? Tailwind seems to be the new hotness, at least for a much improved experience from dealing with plain vanilla CSS”, at least from how I remember it, from a couple of decades ago. So I used Tailwind, and I asked ChatGPT to generate some CSS for me. “Give me a template, give me a – whatever it is”, and I was able to copy-paste, make some tweaks, and then I was done by the end of the night. My job was done. I had a solution, it got shipped, and I moved on in my life.
[00:29:56.28] Now, am I going to be doing Tailwind all day, every day? No. I had a specific problem, and I solved it using these new tools. So I’d like to hear from both of you, are you sensing this tug away from the fanaticism, if you want to call it that, around specific languages or technologies, now that we have these AI tools that are entrenching themselves in our lives as software engineers, as professionals? Are you sensing this tug as well, that these things ultimately don’t matter that much?