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Ultimately you’re expressing an anti-simplicity sentiment, which is well aligned with the parent post. Clever abstractions may appear to reduce the “burden”, bu

Ultimately you’re expressing an anti-simplicity sentiment, which is well aligned with the parent post. Clever abstractions may appear to reduce the “burden”, but they are often fashionable and add cognitive overhead. Go does indeed often force you to do things the “dumb” way (see your own examples) but the thesis is that this is easier to understand and maintain over time.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago
I'm sure somebody said something like that when all those kids started to the clever abstractions that were functions instead of doing things manually in assembly. Simplicity!
- carlhjerpe 5y ago
  Some developers don't want to use the ternary operator because it's "too complex". I believe there's a middle ground to be found where further abstractions add complexity rather than reduce it. Where that middle ground is, I don't know.
  - wtetzner 5y ago
    That’s a strange definition of complexity. I can see people avoiding the ternary operator because the syntax is hard to read, but it’s no more complex than `if`.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  This is just vapid snark. Of course some abstraction is helpful, but there's also a point at which abstraction impedes understanding. Ergo, we're debating where the "sweet spot" is. Note also that we can say "Go is the sweet spot for most applications" while also acknowledging that it makes certain kinds of programming difficult (e.g., writing a compiler). It's okay to recognize tradeoffs; there's no need to oversimplify or otherwise engage dogmatically.
wtetzner 5y ago
> Ultimately you’re expressing an anti-simplicity sentiment I disagree. First, making a language simple doesn’t make programs simpler, and often does the opposite. I’m also not sure I buy the idea that Go is actually simple. It lacks a lot of features, but that’s not the same as being simple. I mean, it supports runtime reflection, which seems more complicated than features like traits or generics. And code using reflection is never simple.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

I'm sure somebody said something like that when all those kids started to the clever abstractions that were functions instead of doing things manually in assembly. Simplicity!

carlhjerpe 5y ago
Some developers don't want to use the ternary operator because it's "too complex". I believe there's a middle ground to be found where further abstractions add complexity rather than reduce it. Where that middle ground is, I don't know.
- wtetzner 5y ago
  That’s a strange definition of complexity. I can see people avoiding the ternary operator because the syntax is hard to read, but it’s no more complex than `if`.
throwaway894345 5y ago
This is just vapid snark. Of course some abstraction is helpful, but there's also a point at which abstraction impedes understanding. Ergo, we're debating where the "sweet spot" is. Note also that we can say "Go is the sweet spot for most applications" while also acknowledging that it makes certain kinds of programming difficult (e.g., writing a compiler). It's okay to recognize tradeoffs; there's no need to oversimplify or otherwise engage dogmatically.

wtetzner 5y ago

> Ultimately you’re expressing an anti-simplicity sentiment I disagree. First, making a language simple doesn’t make programs simpler, and often does the opposite. I’m also not sure I buy the idea that Go is actually simple. It lacks a lot of features, but that’s not the same as being simple. I mean, it supports runtime reflection, which seems more complicated than features like traits or generics. And code using reflection is never simple.