---
title: "Learning Go: Methods and Pointer Receivers"
date: 2017-12-29T10:46:08-05:00
draft: true
tags: ["golang", "learning"]
---

# I gotta get Go-ing with this language

Being in the position I am, I've worked with almost nothing but exclusively interpreted languages, namely Ruby and Python.
Both of these are great tools to have to solve problems and to solve them quickly. It is easy to pick up an idea and get
a prototype going in Python or Ruby due to not having to run any compilation, code changes can be tested instantly often by
just rerunning the interpreter. However, this can be a problem when programs get large. I've been a part of projects
where there are hundreds of thousands of lines of Ruby and Python code where changes to some backend call can cause a ten second
difference in the load time of the frontend client.

![Image](/img/post/golang.gif)


People much smarter than me at Google have created and actively develop the programming language Go, which is a compiled language
that does a lot of cool things out of the box. Knowing how many problems I've had in development that could be potentially solved by Go 
(and missing compilers which catch some nasty bugs before the software starts), I want to learn Go and blog about cool things I find or cool
things I do with it.

## Methods in Golang?

Yes, and this comes from old OOP concepts of message passing to objects. These methods are a neat way to be able to add functionality to your
types you define in Go. If you are like me coming from OOP languages, methods are a very helpful construct.

So we've got these people right? And people in this universe are very simple. All they have to identify them is their name, their astrological sign
and their disposition.

```go
type Person struct { name, sign, disposition String }
```

Now a person's name may not change, not their sign, but what about their disposition? I'd say my average day is an emotional rollercoaster! Only kidding,
but we need a way to operate on the person's disposition, let's say based on weather.

```go
// Actually a pointer receiver
func (p *Person) AlterDisposition (weather string) {
    switch weather {
    case 'rainy':
        p.disposition = "sad"
    case 'sunny':
        p.disposition = "happy"
    default:
        p.disposition = "meh"
    }
}
```

That's a funky syntax for this