5 ms·

There is no discussion if the language is good, it's already quite convincingly proven it's good. The question was if generics would make the language even bett

by tinco 8y ago

There is no discussion if the language is good, it's already quite convincingly proven it's good. The question was if generics would make the language even better. Some people think that's a no brainer, others are not so sure, and the latter group included the core maintainers. People use the language because it is good, I think at this point one can state that as objective fact. Once people use it, they'll complain when something is not as nice as it could be, like the error handling, and like the generics. I wonder if in 2000 people felt the way about Java 1.3 people feel about Go now. Java had a similar rise to prevalence, and it also lacked some features we now consider crucial, such as generics. I personally would never want to go back to Java 1.3. I feel I'd much rather code in Go instead, even if it lacks generics. But I still think it's worth considering if Go would turn out to become Java, if it now embraces generics.

edem 8y ago
The language is crap. Just because people are using it does not mean it is good. Take a look at javascript. Same deal. You did not state any "fact"s why Go is good. Maybe it is good compared to Cobol or Fortran, but not compared to pretty much everything else.
- tinco 8y ago
  Oh come on. People are forced to use Javascript, I don't think it would even exist today if it wasn't the only crossbrowser language. Almost no one is forced to use Go, and yet people flock to it. I don't feel I need to state the things that make Go good because it's already been done a thousand times, and everyone in this thread already knows why it is good. Have you ever built something in Go? I'm almost as productive in Go as I am in Ruby, and that was within a week of learning it. It's crazy good for a language that lacks so much expression.
  - skohan 8y ago
    To be fair, I feel like go's simplicity makes it easy to get small things up and running, but the pain comes when your project starts getting large. That's when additional abstractions are missed.
    - tinco 8y ago
      I don't think Go should be used for larger projects. Apparently though the community disagrees because they're really adding generics.
      - stephenbez 8y ago
        It's interesting, I feel like it's the opposite and Go excels at large projects. Compared to other languages, Go doesn't let you use as many abstractions, so writing code takes longer, but it is much more straightforward to read. I work at a >1000 person company that codes mostly in Scala, and some in Go, and would prefer to read unknown Go code any day. With the Scala I run into things like implicit parameters and 7 layer of inheritance, but the Go code is straightforward. Go is somewhat of a lowest common denominator language. You could out perform it with a small team of strong developers, but when once your project gets to a certain size, it's unlikely all of the developers will be strong.
        tinco 8y ago
        That is an interesting point, and even if that is true, it still means adding generics would be a detriment. I do wonder if that's an inherent property of languages with a more expressive type system. Many would blame it on OOP, but I think Haskell also suffers from it. Haskell that is written without using typeclasses is much more readable than Haskell that's written more plainly, at least to me. It might be a unique property to Go, which other language is strongly typed yet with such a basic typesystem, lacking inheritance or even generics?
        jungler 8y ago
        I think it's philosophically interesting. The Go approach to needing a more powerful language is to assume that you actually want to write a custom code generator for your project's needs. And it's not pretty to do so(the "go generate" thing makes quite a wart in its attempt to ease this process), but it works, and you can move on with your project. Most newer languages get tied in knots trying to generalize that same task and have a kind of configurability meltdown where everyone does it differently, so while it can be shared and reused in theory, none of it is actually compatible. I think it's akin to criticism of OOP in that in a lot of cases, "you wanted a banana but you got a banana plantation, three tractors, and twenty employees". And Go is just a little bit closer to the sweet spot than C was, since a greater proportion of Go code seems to successfully avoid extensive preprocessing. On the other hand, it might be a bit too restrictive for prototyping to have these power limits. I definitely have an easier time feeling my way through an unknown data modelling problem if I can start slinging things together dynamically.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
    >> Almost no one is forced to use Go, and yet people flock to it. Well, at some point people "flocked" to javascript, and they weren't forced to. So it's a good language, then? Or sub javascript for java, or your favourite bashable language.
    - hollerith 8y ago
      I will assume you're referring to Node. The browser explains why many coders know Javascript well; the fact that many coders know Javascript well explains the popularity of Node --without our having to resort to the hypothesis that Javascript is a good language.
      - YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
        I'm referring to the adoption of javascript as the scripting language for browsers. Why else do "many coders know javascript well"?
        kazinator 8y ago
        The story of how we got Javascript in browsers has absolutely nothing to do with "adoption".
        YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
        But there wasn't anything stopping early browsers from using a different scripting language. They stuck with javascript. Was that because it was a good language? And what about Java, for example? And why don't people "flock" to LISP, say, or Haskell? Are those "bad" languages, now? And what about software, like windows- is windows widely used because it's a great operating system? Adoption is a rotten bad measure of quality. Not just in programming languages- in everything.
        kazinator 8y ago
        > But there wasn't anything stopping early browsers from using a different scripting language. You mean "nothing stopping the other browser, Microsoft Internet Explorer, from adopting Netscape's Javascript too".
  - ernst_klim 8y ago
    >People are forced to use Javascript People are not forced to use Javascript since there are a dozen of great LangName->Js infrastructures. People are not forced to use PHP or other badly designed languages as well. I wouldn't call Go a bad language due to the subjectivity of the term, I would rather call it ad-hoc language, which is basically a DSL sufficient for some domain, but not very suitable for a general engineering. Go is a compiled PHP, its rather weak type system and oversimplified nature are suitable and sufficient for webdev for the economical reason. Building something complex in Go is possible but painful, Go doesn't help here but rather impedes making you write your own dynamic type system and other facilities to compensate the language's deficiencies.
  - cmlndz 8y ago
    If usage is a measure of ‘goodness’ (whatever that is), then PHP must be the best programming language the world has ever seen. And we know it’s not.
- fierro 8y ago
  "Go is a crap language, you didn't even state any 'facts' why Go is good!" >> does not provide 'facts' why Go is crap
dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
> There is no discussion if the language is good, it's already quite convincingly proven it's good. I'm sorry, you can't prove a language is good or bad. You can prove it's popular, widely discussed, used by several individuals and organizations, is actively developed, but "good" and "bad" are inherently subjective terms and there's no way to prove it unless there happens to be a universally accepted definition of what constitutes a good or bad programming language.
- spicyusername 8y ago
  > a universally accepted definition of what constitutes a good or bad programming language. Implicitly many people, rightfully in my opinion, conflate the utility of a programming language with that language being good. If many people are able to solve real problems with a language, that language is good, the end. Good does not equal perfect, there is no perfect in the real world of engineering.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
    On the other hand, many people conflate the popularity of a programming language with it being backed by a big corporation. There actually are a few measurable metrics of programming languages, but even when we discuss such a simple factor as execution speed that you'd expect to be universally accepted as positive, there will be people arguing that developer time is more expensive and savings made here are more important than the gains on execution speed. There is simply no way two programmers are going to agree in classifying a number of languages as good or bad.
    - spicyusername 8y ago
      > There is simply no way two programmers are going to agree in classifying a number of languages as good or bad. If there is one thing humans love doing is finding small reasons to disagree hah.
  - joelfolksy 8y ago
    So in the world you're describing, pretty much all languages are "good," and none are "perfect." Not very interesting so far. What are the adjectives that fall in the middle, the ones that some languages deserve and others don't?
miaklesp 8y ago
It's good only for those who didn't see anything better.
vonseel 8y ago
One might also wonder how long it took Java to respond to user complaints, and I would suspect Go core team has been much faster addressing these issues and responding to developers.

by tinco 8y ago

edem 8y ago

The language is crap. Just because people are using it does not mean it is good. Take a look at javascript. Same deal. You did not state any "fact"s why Go is good. Maybe it is good compared to Cobol or Fortran, but not compared to pretty much everything else.

tinco 8y ago
Oh come on. People are forced to use Javascript, I don't think it would even exist today if it wasn't the only crossbrowser language. Almost no one is forced to use Go, and yet people flock to it. I don't feel I need to state the things that make Go good because it's already been done a thousand times, and everyone in this thread already knows why it is good. Have you ever built something in Go? I'm almost as productive in Go as I am in Ruby, and that was within a week of learning it. It's crazy good for a language that lacks so much expression.
- skohan 8y ago
  To be fair, I feel like go's simplicity makes it easy to get small things up and running, but the pain comes when your project starts getting large. That's when additional abstractions are missed.
  - tinco 8y ago
    I don't think Go should be used for larger projects. Apparently though the community disagrees because they're really adding generics.
    - stephenbez 8y ago
      It's interesting, I feel like it's the opposite and Go excels at large projects. Compared to other languages, Go doesn't let you use as many abstractions, so writing code takes longer, but it is much more straightforward to read. I work at a >1000 person company that codes mostly in Scala, and some in Go, and would prefer to read unknown Go code any day. With the Scala I run into things like implicit parameters and 7 layer of inheritance, but the Go code is straightforward. Go is somewhat of a lowest common denominator language. You could out perform it with a small team of strong developers, but when once your project gets to a certain size, it's unlikely all of the developers will be strong.
      - tinco 8y ago
        That is an interesting point, and even if that is true, it still means adding generics would be a detriment. I do wonder if that's an inherent property of languages with a more expressive type system. Many would blame it on OOP, but I think Haskell also suffers from it. Haskell that is written without using typeclasses is much more readable than Haskell that's written more plainly, at least to me. It might be a unique property to Go, which other language is strongly typed yet with such a basic typesystem, lacking inheritance or even generics?
      - jungler 8y ago
        I think it's philosophically interesting. The Go approach to needing a more powerful language is to assume that you actually want to write a custom code generator for your project's needs. And it's not pretty to do so(the "go generate" thing makes quite a wart in its attempt to ease this process), but it works, and you can move on with your project. Most newer languages get tied in knots trying to generalize that same task and have a kind of configurability meltdown where everyone does it differently, so while it can be shared and reused in theory, none of it is actually compatible. I think it's akin to criticism of OOP in that in a lot of cases, "you wanted a banana but you got a banana plantation, three tractors, and twenty employees". And Go is just a little bit closer to the sweet spot than C was, since a greater proportion of Go code seems to successfully avoid extensive preprocessing. On the other hand, it might be a bit too restrictive for prototyping to have these power limits. I definitely have an easier time feeling my way through an unknown data modelling problem if I can start slinging things together dynamically.
- YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
  >> Almost no one is forced to use Go, and yet people flock to it. Well, at some point people "flocked" to javascript, and they weren't forced to. So it's a good language, then? Or sub javascript for java, or your favourite bashable language.
  - hollerith 8y ago
    I will assume you're referring to Node. The browser explains why many coders know Javascript well; the fact that many coders know Javascript well explains the popularity of Node --without our having to resort to the hypothesis that Javascript is a good language.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
      I'm referring to the adoption of javascript as the scripting language for browsers. Why else do "many coders know javascript well"?
      - kazinator 8y ago
        The story of how we got Javascript in browsers has absolutely nothing to do with "adoption".
        YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
        But there wasn't anything stopping early browsers from using a different scripting language. They stuck with javascript. Was that because it was a good language? And what about Java, for example? And why don't people "flock" to LISP, say, or Haskell? Are those "bad" languages, now? And what about software, like windows- is windows widely used because it's a great operating system? Adoption is a rotten bad measure of quality. Not just in programming languages- in everything.
        kazinator 8y ago
        > But there wasn't anything stopping early browsers from using a different scripting language. You mean "nothing stopping the other browser, Microsoft Internet Explorer, from adopting Netscape's Javascript too".
- ernst_klim 8y ago
  >People are forced to use Javascript People are not forced to use Javascript since there are a dozen of great LangName->Js infrastructures. People are not forced to use PHP or other badly designed languages as well. I wouldn't call Go a bad language due to the subjectivity of the term, I would rather call it ad-hoc language, which is basically a DSL sufficient for some domain, but not very suitable for a general engineering. Go is a compiled PHP, its rather weak type system and oversimplified nature are suitable and sufficient for webdev for the economical reason. Building something complex in Go is possible but painful, Go doesn't help here but rather impedes making you write your own dynamic type system and other facilities to compensate the language's deficiencies.
- cmlndz 8y ago
  If usage is a measure of ‘goodness’ (whatever that is), then PHP must be the best programming language the world has ever seen. And we know it’s not.
fierro 8y ago
"Go is a crap language, you didn't even state any 'facts' why Go is good!" >> does not provide 'facts' why Go is crap

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago

> There is no discussion if the language is good, it's already quite convincingly proven it's good. I'm sorry, you can't prove a language is good or bad. You can prove it's popular, widely discussed, used by several individuals and organizations, is actively developed, but "good" and "bad" are inherently subjective terms and there's no way to prove it unless there happens to be a universally accepted definition of what constitutes a good or bad programming language.

spicyusername 8y ago
> a universally accepted definition of what constitutes a good or bad programming language. Implicitly many people, rightfully in my opinion, conflate the utility of a programming language with that language being good. If many people are able to solve real problems with a language, that language is good, the end. Good does not equal perfect, there is no perfect in the real world of engineering.
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
  On the other hand, many people conflate the popularity of a programming language with it being backed by a big corporation. There actually are a few measurable metrics of programming languages, but even when we discuss such a simple factor as execution speed that you'd expect to be universally accepted as positive, there will be people arguing that developer time is more expensive and savings made here are more important than the gains on execution speed. There is simply no way two programmers are going to agree in classifying a number of languages as good or bad.
  - spicyusername 8y ago
    > There is simply no way two programmers are going to agree in classifying a number of languages as good or bad. If there is one thing humans love doing is finding small reasons to disagree hah.
- joelfolksy 8y ago
  So in the world you're describing, pretty much all languages are "good," and none are "perfect." Not very interesting so far. What are the adjectives that fall in the middle, the ones that some languages deserve and others don't?

miaklesp 8y ago

It's good only for those who didn't see anything better.

vonseel 8y ago

One might also wonder how long it took Java to respond to user complaints, and I would suspect Go core team has been much faster addressing these issues and responding to developers.