Sun 26 Sep 2021
Tags: golang, software engineering
So this weekend I scratched a long-standing itch and whipped up
a little utility for colourising
output. It's called ctap and is now available on
Github.
I have a bunch of processes that spit out TAP output at various
points as tests are run on outputs, and having the output
coloured for fast scanning is a surprisingly significant UX
improvement.
I've been a happy user of the javascript
tap-colorize
utility for quite a while, and it does the job nicely.
Unfortunately, it's not packaged (afaict) on either CentOS or
Ubuntu, which means you typically have to install from source
via npm, which is fine on a laptop, but a PITA on a server.
And though I'm pretty comfortable building
I've always found node packages to be more bother than they're
worth.
Which brings us back to ctap this weekend. Given how simple the
TAP protocol is, I figured building an MVP colouriser couldn't
more than an hour or two - and so it turned out.
But what's really nice is all the modern tooling that provides
you with impressive boosts as you go these days. On this project
that included:
These are fun times to be a software engineer!
Wed 17 Jun 2020
Tags: perl, golang
I started using perl back in 1996, around version 5.003, while working at UBC
in Vancover. We were working on a student management system at the time,
written in C, interfacing to an Oracle database. We started experimenting with
this Common Gateway Interface thing (CGI) that had recently appeared, and let
you write interactive applications on the web (!). perl was the tool of
choice for CGI, and we were able to talk to Oracle using a perl module that
spoke Oracle Call Interface (OCI).
That project turned out to be pretty successful, and I've been developing in
perl ever since. Perl has a reputation for being obscure and abstruse, but I
find it a lovely language - powerful and expressive. Yes it's probably too
easy to write bad/unreadable perl, but it's also straightforward to write
elegant, readable perl. I routinely pick up code I wrote 5 years ago and have
no problems reading it again.
That said, perl is showing its age in places, and over the last few years
I've also been using other languages where different project requirements
made that make sense. I've written significant code in C, Java, python,
ruby, and javascript/nodejs, but for me none of them were sufficiently
attractive to threaten perl as my language of choice.
About a year ago I started playing with Go at $dayjob, partly interested
in the performance gains of a compiled language, and partly to try out the
concurrency features I'd heard about. Learning a new language is always
challenging, but Go's small footprint, consistency, and well-written
libraries really made picking it up pretty straightforward.
And for me the killer feature is this: Go is the only language besides
perl in which I regularly find myself writing a good chunk of code, getting
it syntactically correct, and then testing it and finding that it Just
Works, first time. The friction between thinking and coding seems low enough
(at least the way my brain works) that I can formulate what I'm thinking
with a pretty high chance of getting it right. I still get surprised when it
happens, but it's great when it does!
Other things help too - it's crazy fast, especially coming from mostly
interpreted languages recently; the concurrency stuff really is nice, and
let's you think about concurrent flows pretty intuitively; and lots of the
the language decisions like formatting, tooling, and composition just seem
to sit pretty well with me.
So while I'm still very happy writing perl, especially for less
performance-intensive applications, I'm now a happy little Go developer
as well, and enjoying exploring some more advanced corners of a new
language home.
Yay Go!
If you're interested in learning Go, the online docs are pretty great: start
with the Tour of Go and
How to write Go code, and then read
Effective Go.
If you're after a book-length treatment, the standard text is
The Go Programming Language by Donovan and Kernighan.
It's excellent but pretty dense, more textbook than tutorial.
I've also read Go in Practice,
which is more accessible and cookbook-style. I thought it was okay, and learnt
a few things, but I wouldn't go out of your way for it.