I am not a great fan of go. I have much material for a blog post on the subject which I will probably never get around to writing. But in the meantime, I'm being paid to write the stuff, and while I will continue to protest that it is not the right tool for the job, I am unlikely to be able to escape it entirely.

So I hereby present some ways of doing things that are otherwise difficult, ugly, or annoying to achieve in go. The last language I remember feeling the need to develop a bunch of tricks like this for was PHP¹, which I think says a great deal in itself.

I'm a functional alcoholic programmer, in both broad and narrow senses. I don't have a hard position on the dynamic vs static typing debate, but I do believe that strong, featureful type systems are an enormous benefit to programmers, especially if checked statically. The worst of both worlds is probably a weak static type system that offers a false sense of security while making the programmer's life more difficult for no obvious benefit.

The patterns aspire to the following qualities, in roughly descending order of importance:

• safety
• composability
• readability

These tricks will be based on go 1.18, released relatively recently at the time of writing. This is a trade-off: I have no doubt that many sensible people are holding off an upgrade to 1.18 until it's had some time to bed in, but OTOH generics make such a huge difference to the langauge that avoiding their use would make several of these techniques obsolete right out the door. I may choose to attempt alternative generic-free solutions to some problems, if there is a particularly good reason (such as doing it for the lulz).

(currently just list of random ideas)

• fan out based on a tag extraction function
• fan in, with optional conversion (or should that be separate)
• priority
• functor and other typeclass support (except they're not really those typeclasses because the structures are mutable, maybe just use interfaces (maybe with the dawn of generics we'll get a standard or semi-standard set of such interfaces))
  • map
  • filter
  • folpd
  • zip