> Just Enough Batteries Included

This is just an anecdote, but recently I decided to give golang a spin, and wrote a small command line utility in it.

I won’t tell you the pain of trying to find an argument parser with support for GNU-style long options. I suppose that’s something I should write myself rather than use the standard library or find a third party library, because simplicity. /s Edit: folks posted helpful suggestions, I take this paragraph back.

Instead, let’s talk about something basic, regexp. Turns out golang’s regexp package supports named capture groups, but if you want to actually refer to the capture groups by names, you need to manually pair FindStringSubmatch result with SubexpNames in a loop. Can’t make this shit up. Seriously, what’s the point of named capture groups if you can’t refer to the groups by names? If this is just enough battery included, your expectations might be a tad too low.