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I think you might be reading an unintended meaning into that sentence. I'm talking about the experience of using Go vs. what people write about it, not about yo
by dnr 7y ago
I think you might be reading an unintended meaning into that sentence. I'm talking about the experience of using Go vs. what people write about it, not about your experiences with other languages (which I have no intention of invalidating). I was pointing out that sometimes one can get a skewed perspective of the typical experience by reading blog posts and things (which by definition are written by the more vocal members of a community).
I did use Go professionally for about five years, and read lots of criticisms of it (and still do out of curiosity). Most of them struck me as just not a big deal in practice. When I had to write some list-processing code that could be greatly simplified with generics (a few times per year), I just sighed and typed it out and moved on to a more interesting thing. When I had some repetitive error-handling code, I refactored it or wrote some helper functions. The dependency stuff was annoying when starting a new project, but once you pick a dependency manager/vendoring tool it's fairly straightforward (and of course now this is included).
Certainly, the language and ecosystem has warts and frustrating things. Maybe Elixir has fewer warts, I don't know. But overall the experience of using Go is fairly smooth and boring and productive. The things that people like to complain about don't really register in day-to-day usage. That's not BS, that's my personal experience.
- pdimitar 7y agoWell, you might have the Stockholm syndrome. :D But yeah, we all have to deal with some idiosyncrasies with our languages/tools of choice. It’s inevitable. For the record, I really love Elixir but it’s quite easy to swallow/ignore errors there as well. (To translate one of the Go’s criticisms.) So I get what you’re saying. But IMO the outsiders’ perspective is valuable because it outlines stuff we have gotten used to, and they might not be willing to do that. So such criticisms might be minor for you and me but they add much-needed nuance in the long run, I believe.
- pmarreck 7y agoFair enough. And truth be told, a lot of the issues I encountered in the languages I mentioned were from other people’s flawed code designs, not my own.