I’ve just released an example project written in Go that scrapes Hacker News and presents the results on a web page. For a more robust approach to obtaining HN data, I would recommend relying on the official API instead in case the markup changes. Making the request Grabbing the HTML from the HN front page can be done using the built-in HTTP client in Go, found under the http package:

One reason Go is interesting to me is for it’s portability. I’m often running programs on Windows machines which get wiped pretty often, so it saves me time when I don’t have to install dependencies like Python or a C++ runtime. With Go, everything is statically compiled into a single binary which runs out of the box. To give it a try, I decided to take a simple task I would normally perform in Python, and do it in Go instead.

Go is a statically typed system language designed for high productivity and efficiency. I’ve been reading about Go on and off for a while, but not been able to play around with it much until recently. Coming from a Java background, here are some things that I found remarkable or unusual from my beginner’s perspective. Opinionated Go’s guiding principles are to be simple, easy to use, fast, and efficient. This means removing syntax debates with the go fmt tool, having a picky compiler which disallows things like unused variables or packages, and disallowing inheritance in favour of composition.