Nate Finch
npf.io · Personal blog · on HN since 2014
Nate Finch, a Go developer, writes about the Go language, its tooling and design debates, plus Hugo and remote work.
What HN saysHN commenters cite it for Go criticism, the Go 2 contracts proposal, and as influential on their thinking, and mention his posts on Hugo and TOML.
20HN people shared it
5linked it in comments
18stories submitted
703story points
4 years agolast shared
2014people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Why Go gets criticized so much3 people · 144 points · first shared 2014 · 236 comments on HN
- 2Go2 contracts go too far3 people · 2 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 33.5 Years, 500k Lines of Go2 people · 328 points · first shared 2017 · 238 comments on HN
- 4Safer Enums in Go2 people · 96 points · first shared 2022 · 119 comments on HN
- 5How to Pay Remote Workers2 people · 65 points · first shared 2019 · 76 comments on HN
- 6Why Infer Types?1 people · 47 points · first shared 2022 · 29 comments on HN
- 7Mage – make/rake for Go1 people · 8 points · first shared 2018 · 2 comments on HN
- 8Starlight: Run python dialect, Starlark, safely from go1 people · 3 points · first shared 2018 · 1 comments on HN
- 9Use Hugo to support Go vanity imports1 people · 3 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 10Comment Your Code1 people · 3 points · first shared 2017 · 1 comments on HN
- 11Go Plugins Are as Easy as Pie1 people · 2 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
- 12Hiring Remote1 people · 1 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 13Code Must Never Lie1 people · 1 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 14Intro to toml1 people · first shared 2017
- 15Intro to go interfaces1 people · first shared 2015
What HN people wrote when they linked it
earthboundkid · 2020-05-29
This was a big influence on my thinking: https://npf.io/2016/10/reusable-commands/
drej · 2019-07-29
I read through this yesterday and I'm fairly confused about all that.
1. This is a long proposal. Excluding the implementation/issues/comparison parts, it clocks in at 7700 words. Compared to the 27k-word long Go spec, this is epic. I know the proposal is more verbose than the eventual spec (if accepted), but still...
2. There are some valid points in Nate Finch's criticism of the previous proposal (https://npf.io/2018/09/go2-contracts-go-too-far/). Be it philosophical arguments or just plain syntax ones - like writing `func (...)(...)(...)` in function declarations.
I don't know. I'd like some form of generics in the language, but I'm not sure if complex designs like this are likely to be embraced by the community.
zackelan · 2017-12-15
At that point you're not writing JSON though. Once you start bolting on non-standard bells and whistles, why not recognize that JSON was never meant to be used for config files, and switch to something that was, like TOML [0]?
0: https://npf.io/2014/08/intro-to-toml/
splawn · 2015-09-15
I have been hem-hawing for years on what my next programming language to invest time into learning should be and I found this comment extremely informative. After verifying that what you said about their design goals for Go wasn't a strawman, I got curious about criticism against Go. I did some googling and found this:
http://npf.io/2014/10/why-everyone-hates-go/
NateDad · 2015-07-20
The nice thing about Hugo is that there's no install step. Just download and run with zero dependencies. Plus it's literally 100 times faster than jekyll. Friend of mine with a large blog (1000-ish posts) has to wait over 5 minutes for jekyll to render his whole site. He tried Hugo with the same site: 1 second. This enables live reloading in a local browser whenever you change anything in your site, which is super handy.
My first post about Hugo on my (obviously) Hugo-powered site: https://npf.io/2014/08/hugo-is-awesome/