intranation

Openresty and Lua are great, but Go is a more generally applicable language for building web services. So when taken in that context Go makes more sense if we look at it as a learning exercise as well as a new part of the stack.

We did have some configuration - it was stored in Varnish and Nginx. The time cost of shipping new redirects when content is moved or new routing configuration for new tools coming online is non-negligible, particularly as we're in the middle of moving 300+ government agencies onto the GOV.UK platform. Also having all those redirects, friendly URLs, and application mappings in static configuration makes self-service publishing tools very difficult to build.

This is all outlined in the blog post - perhaps not as clearly as I would have liked, though!

Not sure what that has to do with semantics. Are you saying that NAV etc. aren't valid semantics on applications?

This is a great move for me, and I hope ultimately for Ben. This way I'm empowered to fix my own issues, and pay someone else to run it for me.

It's opt-in, otherwise most packages would break.

To enable it per-file use a file-local variable:

  ;;; -*- lexical-binding: t -*-

I think the learning programming thing falls under "personal creative projects", and I am with you 100%.

Dashes map more cleanly to existing CSS syntax, eg nth-child, background-color, etc. Much like camelCase looks more like Javascript than my_variable.

It might force the developers to commit more in the granular Git way, but it doesn't force bug reporters and discussions to be more mindful. Looking at my timeline, and following Backbone.js and Handlebars, about half my feed on any given day is discussion from 2 or 3 bugs on each of those projects.

So even though the committers might be mindful, doesn't mean all the users of a project are.

WebSockets don't have much startup time at all really. If you're using Socket.io or another Flash-based abstraction you can expect long lead/start up times due to the Flash policy file, but plain old WebSockets should be as fast as any other TCP connection.