3 ms·

Maybe if by "people who know about types languages" you mean "Haskell snobs"

spion 10y ago
But also ML, Scala, C++, C#, Java, TypeScript, Hack, Dart, Swift, Objective C (as of late), Visual Basic... and COBOL snobs.
- jsmith0295 10y ago
  I was referring more to the "joke" part of this. Just because a type system offers slightly more safety doesn't make it better. I'm primarily a Java developer, and I would prefer Go's type system over Java's the vast majority of the time. It does a much better job at staying out of the way.
  - spion 10y ago
    That may be true, but the joke part comes when you actually want to develop new abstractions that are type-safe. For example you cant write a thread-safe map container in Go without sacrificing type safety (i.e. one that would not crash the program when there are concurrent writes to the map). The standard library doesn't offer one either. This means you end up copy pasting the lock related code for every map you want to make thread safe. You have to remember to declare and initialise its lock, to use that lock every time you access it, and to remember to unlock it. Now for some things, this cost isn't too bad. For others, it makes the language a joke. As a result, Go is a toy, or at least, a non-general-purpose language. If the problem you're solving fits its limited set of built-in abstractions, its great. Otherwise, its a disaster. In my experience, well written programs evolve over time to gain new carefully chosen abstractions that cleanly implement shared underlying concepts of the problem domain. These abstractions often require the use of generics. When this happens in a Go project, however, you're out of luck. Even worse, developing primarily in Go means distorting your thinking to fit its limits. This is more or less true in any language, and its not a binary thing. Languages are all over the place on the ladder of abstraction (with lisps being close to the top, Go near the bottom). p.s. Java also suffers because it added generics too late: by the time they were added there was already a clear picture painted of "idiomatic Java". To make matters worse lambdas were also added way too late, and the verbosity of type declarations is still staggeringly high. However, modern Java is a much better language than Go.
  - devishard 10y ago
    I can definitely see the tradeoffs of choosing between Java's bad namespacing conventions and lack of type inference, but keep in mind you're comparing to a 20 year old language. Other languages (i.e. C#, Nim) have learned from Java's mistakes. Go hasn't; they've just gone back to making most of C's mistakes (in type systems). I've no particular love for Java's type system, but I can't criticize it as much because it was a lot more reasonable when it was released (1996). In 2016 there's no excuse for having a type system as broken as Go's.
devishard 10y ago
Or literally any statically-typed language I know of after C. I suppose it's possible there's some language I'm unaware of that has managed to somehow provide less type-checking than Go, but it's certainly not a commonly-used one.
- jsmith0295 10y ago
  It's not really a matter of less or more in my opinion. Java has more type checking, but it doesn't give you much more safety than Go, and it's a lot more cumbersome. In general I find Go's type system to be better than Java's because of this.
  - devishard 10y ago
    I think that Java can definitely provide significantly more protection than Go, but I do agree that Java's horrible namespacing conventions and lack of type inference makes it cumbersome. So what, you're on par with a 20 year old language? C# for example learned from Java's mistakes; why couldn't Go?
    - jsmith0295 10y ago
      I think I just don't come across situations where I find myself needing generics in the software that I typically write. I can imagine it would suck in those situations. There is a workaround for it, though. Basically you write a template and do code generation off of that to sort of approximate generics. I've never done it myself, though.
      - devishard 10y ago
        > I think I just don't come across situations where I find myself needing generics in the software that I typically write. You don't need generics, sure. You can write working code in assembly, too. But abstractions catch more of your mistakes for you. > There is a workaround for it, though. Basically you write a template and do code generation off of that to sort of approximate generics. I've never done it myself, though. So, basically slightly more powerful macros, like in C, with most of the pitfalls and dangers associated with them. There are better approaches to these problems.

spion 10y ago

But also ML, Scala, C++, C#, Java, TypeScript, Hack, Dart, Swift, Objective C (as of late), Visual Basic... and COBOL snobs.

jsmith0295 10y ago
I was referring more to the "joke" part of this. Just because a type system offers slightly more safety doesn't make it better. I'm primarily a Java developer, and I would prefer Go's type system over Java's the vast majority of the time. It does a much better job at staying out of the way.
- spion 10y ago
  That may be true, but the joke part comes when you actually want to develop new abstractions that are type-safe. For example you cant write a thread-safe map container in Go without sacrificing type safety (i.e. one that would not crash the program when there are concurrent writes to the map). The standard library doesn't offer one either. This means you end up copy pasting the lock related code for every map you want to make thread safe. You have to remember to declare and initialise its lock, to use that lock every time you access it, and to remember to unlock it. Now for some things, this cost isn't too bad. For others, it makes the language a joke. As a result, Go is a toy, or at least, a non-general-purpose language. If the problem you're solving fits its limited set of built-in abstractions, its great. Otherwise, its a disaster. In my experience, well written programs evolve over time to gain new carefully chosen abstractions that cleanly implement shared underlying concepts of the problem domain. These abstractions often require the use of generics. When this happens in a Go project, however, you're out of luck. Even worse, developing primarily in Go means distorting your thinking to fit its limits. This is more or less true in any language, and its not a binary thing. Languages are all over the place on the ladder of abstraction (with lisps being close to the top, Go near the bottom). p.s. Java also suffers because it added generics too late: by the time they were added there was already a clear picture painted of "idiomatic Java". To make matters worse lambdas were also added way too late, and the verbosity of type declarations is still staggeringly high. However, modern Java is a much better language than Go.
- devishard 10y ago
  I can definitely see the tradeoffs of choosing between Java's bad namespacing conventions and lack of type inference, but keep in mind you're comparing to a 20 year old language. Other languages (i.e. C#, Nim) have learned from Java's mistakes. Go hasn't; they've just gone back to making most of C's mistakes (in type systems). I've no particular love for Java's type system, but I can't criticize it as much because it was a lot more reasonable when it was released (1996). In 2016 there's no excuse for having a type system as broken as Go's.

devishard 10y ago

Or literally any statically-typed language I know of after C. I suppose it's possible there's some language I'm unaware of that has managed to somehow provide less type-checking than Go, but it's certainly not a commonly-used one.

jsmith0295 10y ago
It's not really a matter of less or more in my opinion. Java has more type checking, but it doesn't give you much more safety than Go, and it's a lot more cumbersome. In general I find Go's type system to be better than Java's because of this.
- devishard 10y ago
  I think that Java can definitely provide significantly more protection than Go, but I do agree that Java's horrible namespacing conventions and lack of type inference makes it cumbersome. So what, you're on par with a 20 year old language? C# for example learned from Java's mistakes; why couldn't Go?
  - jsmith0295 10y ago
    I think I just don't come across situations where I find myself needing generics in the software that I typically write. I can imagine it would suck in those situations. There is a workaround for it, though. Basically you write a template and do code generation off of that to sort of approximate generics. I've never done it myself, though.
    - devishard 10y ago
      > I think I just don't come across situations where I find myself needing generics in the software that I typically write. You don't need generics, sure. You can write working code in assembly, too. But abstractions catch more of your mistakes for you. > There is a workaround for it, though. Basically you write a template and do code generation off of that to sort of approximate generics. I've never done it myself, though. So, basically slightly more powerful macros, like in C, with most of the pitfalls and dangers associated with them. There are better approaches to these problems.