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There's no time for explanation. So what they do is read code to acquaint themselves with the codebase and hopefully become productive before they move on to th

There's no time for explanation. So what they do is read code to acquaint themselves with the codebase and hopefully become productive before they move on to the next job. And that is the one task where Go really shines. Reading arbitrary pieces of code. Definitely. This really shines in the standard library, it consists of extremely readable code and is a good way to get up to speed on canonical Go. We all want to be brilliant writers of code when in fact we are often readers poking helplessly at half understood code to make something happen. We even forget our own abstractions once we haven't looked at them for a couple of months or even weeks. Definitely, but what are we comparing to? I would agree that e.g. C++ and Haskell have this property. Unless you understand the language and commonly-used abstractions, template-heavy C++ code is difficult to read. However, there are many languages that have more powerful type systems than Go, but where code is still easy to read (ML, Object Pascal, Oberon, Ada, etc.).

fauigerzigerk 10y ago
I'm comparing to other widely used languges like C++, C#, Swift, Scala, Java or Python. I don't think any of them allow as few possible meanings of any given language expression as Go does. And I don't think any of them requires as little non-local information to find all code that gets called by any particular expression (perhaps with the important exception of Go's structural interfaces). I wonder whether it is simply a theoretical tautology that the more abstraction features you have in a language, the more different possible meanings any particular syntactical expression can have, and the more effort it requires to figure out its true meaning, assuming you're not familiar with the codebase. Or is that a false dichotomy? I am unfortunately not familiar with Ada or Oberon and Pascal is but a faint memory.

fauigerzigerk 10y ago

I'm comparing to other widely used languges like C++, C#, Swift, Scala, Java or Python. I don't think any of them allow as few possible meanings of any given language expression as Go does. And I don't think any of them requires as little non-local information to find all code that gets called by any particular expression (perhaps with the important exception of Go's structural interfaces). I wonder whether it is simply a theoretical tautology that the more abstraction features you have in a language, the more different possible meanings any particular syntactical expression can have, and the more effort it requires to figure out its true meaning, assuming you're not familiar with the codebase. Or is that a false dichotomy? I am unfortunately not familiar with Ada or Oberon and Pascal is but a faint memory.