Learning Golang. Day 5

:idseparator: - :idprefix: :experimental: :source-highlighter: rouge :rouge-style: pastie :imagesdir: /images :source-linenums-option: on :tip-caption: 💡

As I was working through my morning jobs, I pondered how I’d go about learning Go, today, asking myself:

• Would I attempt to finish up https://go.dev/tour/moretypes/18[the Slices exercise] in the Go Tour from yesterday?
• Would I take it a little easier and play around with https://www.jetbrains.com/go/[Goland]?
• Would I do some background reading on some concepts that I’d covered so far, ones which I wanted to dive deeper into?

image::posts/learning-golang/goland-with-the-slices-exercise-code.png[Goland showing my slices exercise solution]

To be honest, at first I thought of just playing around with Goland because it’s Friday; and Friday’s should be easy and relaxed. No? But then, I thought that I’d just be being slack if I did that, avoiding possibly not being able to finish up the Slices exercise from yesterday. A kind of quiet crabwalk away from something I thought might take me too much effort or time.

But, when I sat down and cracked Goland open, I was staring directly at where I left off yesterday with the Slices exercise, dove right in and finished it! Yes. I finished it!

[source,go]

func Pic(dx, dy int) [][]uint8 { var outer [][]uint8 for i := 0; i < dy; i++ { var inner []uint8 for j := 0; j < dx; j++ { element := uint8((i ^ j) + rand.Intn(100)) inner = append(inner, element) } outer = append(outer, inner) }

return outer

}

Sure, it’s not the prettiest of solutions. Perhaps. But, it works! Regardless, I’m happy with it.

If I’m completely honest, I had a look at https://gist.github.com/tetsuok/2280162[some exercise solutions] and took inspiration from a number of them. As each of them seemed to more or less focus around the same ideas, I don’t feel like I’m cheating in any way.

The part that was completely mine, without inspiration from the others was using rand.Intn(100). I wanted to generate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandomness[a pseudo-random number] between 0 & 255, but haven’t quite clicked with the https://pkg.go.dev/math/rand#Rand.Intn[rand.Intn] function, yet. To appreciate it better, I’m going to go through https://gobyexample.com/random-numbers[Random Numbers] on Go by Example. Perhaps just a little more time and I’ll have it.

Here’s the image which my implementation of `Pic generates.

image::posts/learning-golang/slices-exercise-image.png[The image generated based on my solution to the Go Tour Slices exercise]

== Things of interest

Some notable things about today’s session was that I had to double-check what a uint8 is. I feel a little silly about having to do this, as I should know it (I feel).

For complete honesty, it’s an unsigned 8-bit integers (0 to 255) If you’re interested, DigitalOcean’s blog has https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/understanding-data-types-in-go[an excellent post on Go’s data types].

Otherwise, everything went well, and I’m super happy with having passed the test with a bit of originality, right at the 30-minute mark.

See you, link:/learning-golang/day-6/[Monday]!