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Somewhere in my drafts, I have a 101 problems with Go. I only made it to 43, but I only spent an hour or so on it. The language they were shooting for feels li

Somewhere in my drafts, I have a 101 problems with Go. I only made it to 43, but I only spent an hour or so on it. The language they were shooting for feels like "C with garbage collection". The language they were actually aiming for was probably closer to "something we can easily transpile python to". In the end, the language they got is a bit of a mess, with fairly arbitrary hyper-pedantry causing more problems than it solves. I still use it, but so far only in the small.

vec 9y ago
Go's a great language for Google. Their use case needs very high througput but can tolerate GC pauses, their code is a giant single-repo monolith with thousands of contributors where pedantry prevents conflict, and they hire a bunch of people straight out of college who haven't figured out how not to be clever yet. "C, but with unremovable training wheels" is a really good tradeoff for their specific situation. Why anyone who doesn't share Google's unique issues would want to use it, though, is beyond me.
- pasabagi 9y ago
  I like it because I genuinely don't have opinions about many of the things Go is opinionated about. As I see it, programming is something of a craft, people have different opinions about how to do it, and the only real way to evaluate these opinions is to have a lot of experience. Not having a great deal of experience, I like that Go essentially proscribes a lot of the stuff people normally have opinions about. It pushes you to write in a way that, for better or worse, some people think is good. I trust their understanding of the tradeoffs involved in engineering software better than mine - and I also trust that, when I outgrow them, I'll notice.
masklinn 9y ago
Go feels a bit like an alt.history version of Java 1, where the fanfic writer thought Java was not convenient enough but also not patronising enough.

vec 9y ago

Go's a great language for Google. Their use case needs very high througput but can tolerate GC pauses, their code is a giant single-repo monolith with thousands of contributors where pedantry prevents conflict, and they hire a bunch of people straight out of college who haven't figured out how not to be clever yet. "C, but with unremovable training wheels" is a really good tradeoff for their specific situation. Why anyone who doesn't share Google's unique issues would want to use it, though, is beyond me.

pasabagi 9y ago
I like it because I genuinely don't have opinions about many of the things Go is opinionated about. As I see it, programming is something of a craft, people have different opinions about how to do it, and the only real way to evaluate these opinions is to have a lot of experience. Not having a great deal of experience, I like that Go essentially proscribes a lot of the stuff people normally have opinions about. It pushes you to write in a way that, for better or worse, some people think is good. I trust their understanding of the tradeoffs involved in engineering software better than mine - and I also trust that, when I outgrow them, I'll notice.

masklinn 9y ago

Go feels a bit like an alt.history version of Java 1, where the fanfic writer thought Java was not convenient enough but also not patronising enough.