For the last 20 years I've been programming almost exclusively in languages with either duck typing or structural typing. These are languages where you can have objects that either conform to an informal interface without that conformance being declared (dynamically-typed languages), or where conformance is simply a matter of matching the interface (Go). This is as opposed to languages where conformance must be explicitly declared somehow, either with a formal subclass relationship (the class-based portion of C++) or by explicitly declaring conformance to an interface (Java).

Not needing to formally declare conformance is powerful because you can take some pre-existing object, declare a new interface that it conforms to, and then use it with your interface. This reduces the endless paperwork around re-wrapping things to make existing objects conform to new interfaces.

I have seen a lot of programmers over the years express concerns; what if something accidentally conforms to an interface and causes some horrible bug? What if I have an interface for Shoot() for a video game and some object wanders in that Shoot()s a real gun by accident? Isn't it safer to formally declare conformance?

From the "It's Obvious When I Say It, But..." department: I recently figured out to put something into words that has been bothering me for a while: We tend to treat stream resolutions as putting a minimum guarantee of quality on a stream. Thus, a "720P stream" must be lower in quality than a "1080P stream", which must be lower in quality than a "4K stream". This is backwards. Stream resolution puts a maximum quality on a stream.

While writing comment on another site, I accidentally came up with what I think is a pretty good definition of "gimmick", since the internet tends to throw the term around with wild abandon. A storyteller that likes getting paid should do things that make the audience want to come back for more. A gimmick is when you do something that win in the short term, but is ultimately burning your audience as they tire of it.

It's abstract to think about how one will someday be old and feeble, but as I was filtering over some spam a moment ago, it occurred to me that someday, my children will have to take away my email because I won't be able to properly process Mr. Al-Amin Dagash's email titled REQUEST FOR A LEGITIMATE BUSINESS PARTNERSHIP. Now that's a sobering thought.

I've said several times that XML Namespaces are simple, but I don't have a good proof document. So here it is.

Around about 1998, I was talking to my electronic music teacher and ethused about the day that would come when we could put, say, everything Mozart ever did on a single cube, holding my fingers up in the air separated by about an inch. "You know, not everything Mozart did was great." "No, I get it, I just mean him as someone who put out a lot of stuff. Everything the Beatles ever did would work, too.

The generation gap just isn't what it used to be. A couple of weeks ago I watched this video, a weird lip-sync riff on Star Wars. Fine. A moment's amusement, sure, and on I click. Two days later I went to a birthday party with my kids, and as the older kids were running around I hear one of the 12-year-olds murmuring the lyrics of this song to himself.

In the last few years, there's a really good metric for "movie will be bad" that I've noticed: If Subway gets the license for their kids meals, it's not going to be a very good movie. I first noticed this when Subway got the Brave movie license. By then Pixar had repeatedly fooled me with trailers that didn't seem all that great, but turned into fantastic movies, so even though the Brave trailers didn't wow me, I was open-minded about it.

So, as previous posts show, I like Go well enough. But as a computer-language polyglot, "Go programmer" is not part of my identity, and I try for a balanced view. It is very human to go overboard in both praise and criticism, both easy to find online.

I open with this because this post will take a, ahh, let's say nuanced position on Go, in that it is going to agree a bit with both sides. Go's type system is weak and there are cases where you can only accomplish something via interface{}, reflection, copy/paste, or code generation... but in a rush to talk about what Go doesn't have, what it does have is too often neglected. When using a tool to solve problems what matters is whether there exists a good solution with that tool, not whether a direct port of a good solution from some other tool works. There certainly are real problems that lack good solutions in Go, but that set of problems is smaller than is sometimes supposed.

Some languages provide many power tools, and it is easy to use a bit of one and a bit of another without ever using any individual tool very deeply. Go provides you only a few tools, so you should use each fully.

If your Go code is a horrible copy/paste disaster, you must figure out whether it is because you are not using tools fully, or if you are missing tools. If you are missing tools, use another tool set. I do not consider that any sort of "concession", because I'm not too interested in whether you use Go; I'm interested in showing people how to fully use tools. All of these techniques will work in other languages as well, with varying degrees of convenience.

Not too long ago, flying could be a relatively pleasant experience, but executives focused on cutting costs have stripped away everything flyers associated with luxury or even dignity. Food, baggage handling, boarding in a logical manner: Things once taken for granted now must be paid for or done without. Flights are more crowded than they’ve been since World War II, when they were carrying troops. And on a recent Ryanair flight, I discovered that not even water was free.