rdn32

Call me Ishmael.

Over the past few years I’ve rather lost sight of the joys of programming. In fact, the whole business was causing me to grow grim around the mouth. I therefore accounted it high time to learn a new programming language.

I’ve picked Go.

It’s a bit too early to say where that might lead: so far all I’ve done is to run through the introductory tutorial and attend a meetup in a pub. So far, though, it seems quite jolly.

The last exercise in the tutorial involved implementing a parallelized web crawler. I was a bit surprised that the sample solution involved explicit locking, but rather pleased to discover that the trick I used to avoid this in my solution (namely, having a counter for the number of worker threads) isn’t unique to me. (See, e.g. the crawler in Russ Cox’s introduction to the language.)