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One of Larry Wall's slogans for Perl is "Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible." In its own way, that's what has made Go the kind of su

One of Larry Wall's slogans for Perl is "Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible." In its own way, that's what has made Go the kind of success that Perl once was. Perl was the glue language of the web and Go is the production language of the cloud. I'm actually a bit scared to imagine a world in which Go was not created, given how much success I've personally had with it. Thanks to the entire Go team.

iainmerrick 9y ago
I think that's a great comparison. Some people love Perl and some hate it, but there's no denying it was a tremendously important language in the 90s. The duct tape of the Internet. (I don't happen to like either Perl or Go myself! But I think I can see why others do.)
kod 9y ago
This is a bad comparison. Core philosophy of Perl is to empower programmers with more than one way to do it. Core philosophy of Go is your coworkers are too stupid to be allowed to have nice things.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  Seems like the core philosophy of Go is the end result of Python's "there's one way to do it". The "Go's design and users are dumb" meme needs to die. It's not even a constructive criticism. It's dishonest, insulting, and it's too bad grown adults and professionals can't see beyond it.
  - kod 9y ago
    I'm not saying Go's design is dumb, it's obviously successful at what it set out to do. I'm not trying to be dishonest or insulting. I've described the philosophy of the language in exactly those terms to Go users, in person, and gotten nods of "Yes, that's right, that's why it works." I think it's more dishonest to claim that the language designers didn't intentionally limit the language to less than the state of the art as of 30 years ago, on purpose, because of concerns about the mental capacity of users. They themselves admit as much.
  - peoplewindow 9y ago
    That meme isn't going to die because one of the creators of Go himself said it was created for dumb users (sorry, Googlers "who can't handle a brilliant language"). There wasn't any constructive criticism coming out of the Go team towards these other languages, rather, they were simply "too complex" in a general sense. The creators have also strongly resisted adding features others consider basic for a decade now, with a variety of nonsensical justifications. It's a stretch to even claim Go was designed at all. From the very blog post this thread is about, we find this statement: Russ discovered—that's the right word—that the generality of Go's methods meant that a function could have methods, leading to the http.HandlerFunc idea, which was an unexpected result for all of us. Go is not exactly a complicated language to begin with, yet the designers "discovered" things about it whilst building it. Go gets a lot of criticism because it's an empirically very poor language and its designers routinely say absurd things that invite ridicule, like "Go is the language of the cloud" or "We have invented a GC for the next 20 years" or "Go was designed for interns and students who can't handle brilliant languages".
  - yahna 9y ago
    Then maybe the creator shouldn't have said it.
yahna 9y ago
You would write Java instead and nothing would be that different.

iainmerrick 9y ago

I think that's a great comparison. Some people love Perl and some hate it, but there's no denying it was a tremendously important language in the 90s. The duct tape of the Internet. (I don't happen to like either Perl or Go myself! But I think I can see why others do.)

kod 9y ago

This is a bad comparison. Core philosophy of Perl is to empower programmers with more than one way to do it. Core philosophy of Go is your coworkers are too stupid to be allowed to have nice things.

aaron-lebo 9y ago
Seems like the core philosophy of Go is the end result of Python's "there's one way to do it". The "Go's design and users are dumb" meme needs to die. It's not even a constructive criticism. It's dishonest, insulting, and it's too bad grown adults and professionals can't see beyond it.
- kod 9y ago
  I'm not saying Go's design is dumb, it's obviously successful at what it set out to do. I'm not trying to be dishonest or insulting. I've described the philosophy of the language in exactly those terms to Go users, in person, and gotten nods of "Yes, that's right, that's why it works." I think it's more dishonest to claim that the language designers didn't intentionally limit the language to less than the state of the art as of 30 years ago, on purpose, because of concerns about the mental capacity of users. They themselves admit as much.
- peoplewindow 9y ago
  That meme isn't going to die because one of the creators of Go himself said it was created for dumb users (sorry, Googlers "who can't handle a brilliant language"). There wasn't any constructive criticism coming out of the Go team towards these other languages, rather, they were simply "too complex" in a general sense. The creators have also strongly resisted adding features others consider basic for a decade now, with a variety of nonsensical justifications. It's a stretch to even claim Go was designed at all. From the very blog post this thread is about, we find this statement: Russ discovered—that's the right word—that the generality of Go's methods meant that a function could have methods, leading to the http.HandlerFunc idea, which was an unexpected result for all of us. Go is not exactly a complicated language to begin with, yet the designers "discovered" things about it whilst building it. Go gets a lot of criticism because it's an empirically very poor language and its designers routinely say absurd things that invite ridicule, like "Go is the language of the cloud" or "We have invented a GC for the next 20 years" or "Go was designed for interns and students who can't handle brilliant languages".
- yahna 9y ago
  Then maybe the creator shouldn't have said it.

yahna 9y ago

You would write Java instead and nothing would be that different.