Programming Terminology(GO)

Go has a language to talk about its language. Terms have been jettisoned because they come with baggage. Re-envision programming. New words to talk about some concepts. We don’t talk about objects we talk about creating TYPES and VALUES of a certain TYPE. We don’t talk about casting, we talk about CONVERSION and ASSERTION.

“dynamic language”

• A dynamic language (Lisp, Perl, Python, Ruby) is designed to optimize programmer efficiency, so you can implement functionality with less code.

“static language”

• A static language (C, C++, Go etc) is designed to optimize hardware efficiency, so that the code you write executes as quickly as possible.

“keywords”

• These are words that a reserved for use by the Go programming language
• They are sometimes called “reserved words”
• You can’t use a keyword for anything other than its purpose

“operator”

• In “2 + 2” the “+” is the OPERATOR
• An operator is a character that represents an action, as for example “+” is an arithmetic OPERATOR that represents addition

“operand”

• In “2 + 2” the “2”s are OPERANDS

“statement”

• In programming a statement is the smallest standalone element of a program that expresses some action to be carried out. It is an instruction that commands the computer to perform a specified action. A program is formed by a sequence of one or more statements.

“expression”

• In programming an expression is a combination of one or more explicit values, constants, variables, operators, and functions that the programming language interprets and computes to produce another value. For example, 2+3 is an expression which evaluates to 5.

The var keyword

“parens”

• ( )

“curly braces”

• { }

“where var can be used”

• Any place within the package

“scope”

• Where a variable exists and is accessible
• Best practice: keep scope as “narrow” as possible

“packages”

• Code that is already written which you can use
• imports

Data types

“primitive data types”

• In computer science, primitive data type is either of the following:
• a basic type is a data type provided by a programming language as a basic building block. Most languages allow more complicated composite types to be constructed starting from basic types.
• a built-in type is a data type for which the programming language provides built-in support.
• In most programming languages, all basic data types are built-in. In addition, many languages also provide a set of composite data types. Opinions vary as to whether a built-in type that is not basic should be considered “primitive”.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_data_type

“composite data types”

• In computer science, a composite data type or compound data type is any data type which can be constructed in a program using the programming language’s primitive data types and other composite types. It is sometimes called a structure or aggregate data type, although the latter term may also refer to arrays, lists, etc. The act of constructing a composite type is known as composition

Zero value

“understanding zero value”

• false for booleans
• 0 for integers
• 0.0 for floats
• “” for strings
• nil for pointers, functions, interfaces, slices, channels, maps

• Use short declaration operator as much as possible
• Use var for zero value, package scope

“idiomatic language”

• Idioms are patterns of speech
• Idiomatic language — idiomatic go
• When someone writes “idiomatic Go” they are writing Go code in the way Go code community writes code