3 ms·

I remember Rob Pike unveiling Go at a Google talk years ago and some Googler got up and said "why would Go be better than Haskel?" and Rob said "Because I can't

• arendtio 7y ago
  I think this is still one of the strongest selling points for Go. It is a pretty solid language with a few basic concepts which are repeated constantly. Sure, it doesn't have generics, error handling is a mess and the language design isn't as consistent as it should be. But what it does, is pushing everybody to write simple code which is easy to understand. So many times I found the documentation (of some library) to be incomplete, but jumping right into the code answered the questions I had. I can't say that about every language.
  • nickbauman 7y ago
    Totally agree. When I first encountered Go, I kinda hated it for its lugubrious combination of being rather "braindead" and opinionated about being braindead at the same time. Typing it every day gave me flashbacks of programming Java circa JDK 1.4 (before the compiler-only based generics were introduced in 1.5, which I still believe didn't solve enough problems for the complexity it added). In short, it felt like a step backward. But after seeing its gc performance sitting at the single-digit ms timeframes with huge heaps (60 gigabytes!) I realized I needed to hold my nose. What helped me make peace with it is its automated testing story. It's baked into the language in a way I've rarely seen in any other runtime.