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it's pretty clear to me. people coming from other languages are used to typing less characters and expressing their ideas like that, and they want to type less

it's pretty clear to me. people coming from other languages are used to typing less characters and expressing their ideas like that, and they want to type less characters in go. for go, a language that idiomizes variable names like `f`, you think that people would be more on board with fewer characters. There are many other areas where go has chosen to avoid tidying up the syntax/making lives easier in the name of simplicity, though I digress. As for your earlier question of "why don't you pick another language," I think this is a silly question to ask. The vast majority of people working for hire are not picking their language. If you have a few hundred kloc written in go, I doubt very much people are in a position to casually introduce new languages, especially if they're trying to improve the current system.

jerf 5y ago
"it's pretty clear to me. people coming from other languages are used to typing less characters and expressing their ideas like that, and they want to type less characters in go." It's not. It's more. A lot more sometimes, plus the indentation for trying to chain maps together is ugly. I think more people who think this is going to be great need to clock some time on the Go Generics playground [1], implement some Map and Filter and MapError functions, and convert some real code to this style in real Go. It's awful. I'm probably spoiled by Haskell and how nice it makes all this, but it's awful even against normal Go code. Try it. The problem is, the thing that makes "functional-style" programming in Go difficult wasn't "missing generics". It was, missing generics, somewhat heavy-weight anonymous function syntax, indentation rules not optimized for deeply-nested functions, a compiler that almost certainly won't optimize through very many layers of these constructs, the inability to put methods on core types and the fact the core types are missing the useful methods/interfaces like "Traversable", no higher kinded types so no monads or anything else like that, a variety of little syntax issues that make this all slick, and probably some things I'm missing. Just getting some generics (and not having generic methods that can add new generic types hurts this style too) just isn't enough to make it slick. Go would need a suite of changes to make this slick and efficient, not just these generics. [1]: https://go2goplay.golang.org/ https://go2goplay.golang.org/

jerf 5y ago

"it's pretty clear to me. people coming from other languages are used to typing less characters and expressing their ideas like that, and they want to type less characters in go." It's not. It's more. A lot more sometimes, plus the indentation for trying to chain maps together is ugly. I think more people who think this is going to be great need to clock some time on the Go Generics playground [1], implement some Map and Filter and MapError functions, and convert some real code to this style in real Go. It's awful. I'm probably spoiled by Haskell and how nice it makes all this, but it's awful even against normal Go code. Try it. The problem is, the thing that makes "functional-style" programming in Go difficult wasn't "missing generics". It was, missing generics, somewhat heavy-weight anonymous function syntax, indentation rules not optimized for deeply-nested functions, a compiler that almost certainly won't optimize through very many layers of these constructs, the inability to put methods on core types and the fact the core types are missing the useful methods/interfaces like "Traversable", no higher kinded types so no monads or anything else like that, a variety of little syntax issues that make this all slick, and probably some things I'm missing. Just getting some generics (and not having generic methods that can add new generic types hurts this style too) just isn't enough to make it slick. Go would need a suite of changes to make this slick and efficient, not just these generics. [1]: https://go2goplay.golang.org/ https://go2goplay.golang.org/