Index Operator Methods

[RaananHadar]

Proposal

As a data scientist wishing for many years that Go was better suited for data science, I am very excited about Go+!

It looks amazing but it currently misses my top feature: more intuitive and readable slicing.

There was a lot of work done on this, even by gods such as Robert Griesemer and Ian Lance Taylor and the Gonum team, so its a big issue. Trying to advance the state of Go for data science, I have written a detailed experienced report on the subject. I think it succeeds in refining and understanding the problem. It also neatly references past work on this. Isolating the problem is a good part of the solution.

To advance a solution and have the Go Core Developers discuss the problem, I was required by the Core Go Developers to propose a solution. Luckily, Robert Griesemer himself has proposed Index operator methods, solving 99% of the solution, so I believe its a pretty good direction. I devised it into a proposal here. Sadly, like 99.999999% of proposals, the Core Go Developers could not reach a consensus, to which I believe stems from Go simply not being geared towards data science.

I am not proclaiming that my proposal is 100% perfect and you should accept it as it is (again, credit should really go to Robert Griesemer). I am hopeful that you take it as a starting point on how to implement this feature, as I believe that 99% of what data scientists need from Go is probably going to be solved by implementing something that solves this problem.

All the best!

Background

Please see my experience report.

Workarounds

Please see before and after examples in the proposal for workarounds. As Go developers, you know they aren't pretty and have very poor readability.

[xushiwei]

Thx for your proposal. Go+ for data science is a big difficult work. So we should have a bit patience about it.

Here are main milestones about Go+:

• https://github.com/goplus/gop/milestones

[xushiwei]

slice operator: #764

[RaananHadar]

Thank you @xushiwei I acknowledge that this is a very big feature and as such it should be done right rather than right away 😃 I believe if you took a survey of what developers are looking for in Go for Data Science this feature will come pretty high, so naturally, I can wait.