2 ms·

Spot on. Some programming languages can be, and are, better than other programming languages. They've all been evolving along a single historical timeline, and

Spot on. Some programming languages can be, and are, better than other programming languages. They've all been evolving along a single historical timeline, and many mistakes were made in the past that we acknowledge and wouldn't make again. To take a well-known example: eminently abusable Turing complete templates in C++ versus the more modern generics as seen in C#, Java, Rust, etc. We should all have a shared goal of building of tooling that maximizes our leverage by providing powerful primitives, and minimizes the number of mistakes we make by providing dependable safety rails. Some more recent programming languages are really doing an exceptional job of this. This critique of Go quite correct. It's a pretty good language with a lot of pretty good ideas, but it's also not without a healthy dose of very sizable flaws as well (which the author has enumerated nicely), and they're made more concerning because most of the Go team refuses to acknowledge many of them. Without even going near the third rails of package management or generics, other niceties like real enums, ways to build typed non-slice non-map data structures, safety measures to protect against Goroutine leaks, or explicit interfaces would all be big improvements. I personally find that once it comes to large projects, Go feels obviously less brittle than Ruby/Python/JS, but much closer to their end of the spectrum compared to languages that offer stronger guarantees (e.g. Rust, Haskell, but also even languages like C#). I don't think that's what its creators were going for.

edflsafoiewq 9y ago
Interesting example of PL progress. I would have said that free-style templates were part of the "C++ way", in fact fairly close to its essence. One feature which seems to lie along the axis of forward progress is lambdas (even Java got them) and one that appears to lie in its past is unstructured control flow (IMO this is somewhat regrettable). One thing I wish languages would all evolve is an expression-language syntax but there was and is a surprising amount of kvetching about Rust's "implicit returns" so perhaps I'll be waiting a while longer for that. OTOH, the idea of forward evolution is also deceptive. The imperative world had tagged unions many decades ago, but they were abandoned in the OOP craze in favor of forms of subtyping (the Modula-3 designers at least gave this justification as a form of pure progress) and it's only fairly recently that they have percolated back over from the functional world and OOP-style subtyping has fallen from grace.

edflsafoiewq 9y ago

Interesting example of PL progress. I would have said that free-style templates were part of the "C++ way", in fact fairly close to its essence. One feature which seems to lie along the axis of forward progress is lambdas (even Java got them) and one that appears to lie in its past is unstructured control flow (IMO this is somewhat regrettable). One thing I wish languages would all evolve is an expression-language syntax but there was and is a surprising amount of kvetching about Rust's "implicit returns" so perhaps I'll be waiting a while longer for that. OTOH, the idea of forward evolution is also deceptive. The imperative world had tagged unions many decades ago, but they were abandoned in the OOP craze in favor of forms of subtyping (the Modula-3 designers at least gave this justification as a form of pure progress) and it's only fairly recently that they have percolated back over from the functional world and OOP-style subtyping has fallen from grace.