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> There is also equivalently smugness about the language in general. This really turns me off about Go. And it seems to attract "tech-splainers" that defend t

> There is also equivalently smugness about the language in general. This really turns me off about Go. And it seems to attract "tech-splainers" that defend the language choices that are made by talking down to people.

throwaway894345 5y ago
I don't know. A lot of the criticism of Go is just wild over-exaggeration. Is "tech-splaining" just setting the record straight? For example, the guy upthread is insinuating that Go is roughly on-par with C++ as they both have nonzero amounts of undefined behavior. Having used both languages extensively, I can say for certain that you will run into a lot more UB in C++ than in Go, and it will be a lot harder to debug when it happens. Similarly, the guy downthread who is making a mountain out of Go's nullable pointers (and all of the other people who complain about Go's type system)--yeah, they are strictly worse than Rust's enums, but the overwhelming majority of all software ever written has been built with languages that have nullable pointers and a good chunk of that is with languages that have fully dynamic type systems (not only is the type system going to allow your null pointer access, but it will allow all manner of type errors!). Is it "smugness" to put criticism into perspective?
- lamontcg 5y ago
  If you look in the past history of language features that are being added or might be added (e.g. generics) you can find a whole lot of past explanation of why the language doesn't need those features in the name of simplicity and why the reader just doesn't understand the brilliance of Rob Pike. Reminds me a lot of the Mac forums where every poor feature in an Apple product is explained with a "let me help you understand why you're thinking about it wrong" kind of answer -- up until Apple fixes the bug / implements the feature to the applause of the same people who were talking down why it would ever need to get fixed. And just the tone of the article here turns me off in the way it begins with a bunch of quotes and philosophy. I actually agree entirely with “Don't communicate by sharing memory. Share memory by communicating" but I figured that out myself in probably 2003 writing crappy perl scripts that utilized parallelism but I wanted to aggressively avoid all the concurrency pitfalls. Actor models and Erlang later made completely intuitive sense to me. The principle is entirely correct, but its fucking weird that a programming language needs to have a list of "proverbs".
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    > If you look in the past history of language features that are being added or might be added (e.g. generics) you can find a whole lot of past explanation of why the language doesn't need those features in the name of simplicity and why the reader just doesn't understand the brilliance of Rob Pike. Isn't this just nutpicking[0]? You have that with every language. I can criticize C++ on proggit right now and 3 or 4 people will respond "C++ has every language feature, just use the ones you want/like/etc and ignore the others, your problems are invalid!". Similarly, on an OCaml forum I can find a dozen people who tell me if Jane Street hasn't run into my problem before and solved it, then it's not a real problem and I'm dumb for trying to do it. I can post here or on r/rust (or proggit) and people will tell me that Rust is strictly faster/easier to develop with than any GC language because in the worst case you can always throw `Rc<T>` on everything. I can post on r/python about how hard it is to optimize Python and people will tell me I'm dumb and I can just use multiprocessing, rewrite the slow bits in C/Cython/etc, use numpy/pandas/etc. I can merely register for an account on a Java forum and be berated for my low intelligence. :) > The principle is entirely correct, but its fucking weird that a programming language needs to have a list of "proverbs". I don't feel as strongly as you do, but I agree that proverbs and analogies are pretty low quality and invite more confusion than they address. Probably only a rung above analogies and a rung below quotations. [0]: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nutpicking https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nutpicking
    - lamontcg 5y ago
      > Isn't this just nutpicking[0]? From that article, I'm specifically addressing "Does this movement _promote_ crazies?" I'd argue the sloganeering attracts them like moths to a flame.
      - throwaway894345 5y ago
        I don't know what is meant by "sloganeering" but if writing a full, nuanced article (e.g., TFA) fits the bill then I'm not sure I agree with your conclusion... In other words, I agree that "sloganeering" attracts the nuts, but I'm not sure I agree that TFA is sloganeering.
- Anaminus 5y ago
  Sometimes people don't actually want help, they just want to complain. Other people misinterpret this as a question or a debate, so their explanatory responses are received negatively. You'll find that this also applies to C++, Rust, every programming language, and anything in general.

throwaway894345 5y ago

I don't know. A lot of the criticism of Go is just wild over-exaggeration. Is "tech-splaining" just setting the record straight? For example, the guy upthread is insinuating that Go is roughly on-par with C++ as they both have nonzero amounts of undefined behavior. Having used both languages extensively, I can say for certain that you will run into a lot more UB in C++ than in Go, and it will be a lot harder to debug when it happens. Similarly, the guy downthread who is making a mountain out of Go's nullable pointers (and all of the other people who complain about Go's type system)--yeah, they are strictly worse than Rust's enums, but the overwhelming majority of all software ever written has been built with languages that have nullable pointers and a good chunk of that is with languages that have fully dynamic type systems (not only is the type system going to allow your null pointer access, but it will allow all manner of type errors!). Is it "smugness" to put criticism into perspective?

lamontcg 5y ago
If you look in the past history of language features that are being added or might be added (e.g. generics) you can find a whole lot of past explanation of why the language doesn't need those features in the name of simplicity and why the reader just doesn't understand the brilliance of Rob Pike. Reminds me a lot of the Mac forums where every poor feature in an Apple product is explained with a "let me help you understand why you're thinking about it wrong" kind of answer -- up until Apple fixes the bug / implements the feature to the applause of the same people who were talking down why it would ever need to get fixed. And just the tone of the article here turns me off in the way it begins with a bunch of quotes and philosophy. I actually agree entirely with “Don't communicate by sharing memory. Share memory by communicating" but I figured that out myself in probably 2003 writing crappy perl scripts that utilized parallelism but I wanted to aggressively avoid all the concurrency pitfalls. Actor models and Erlang later made completely intuitive sense to me. The principle is entirely correct, but its fucking weird that a programming language needs to have a list of "proverbs".
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  > If you look in the past history of language features that are being added or might be added (e.g. generics) you can find a whole lot of past explanation of why the language doesn't need those features in the name of simplicity and why the reader just doesn't understand the brilliance of Rob Pike. Isn't this just nutpicking[0]? You have that with every language. I can criticize C++ on proggit right now and 3 or 4 people will respond "C++ has every language feature, just use the ones you want/like/etc and ignore the others, your problems are invalid!". Similarly, on an OCaml forum I can find a dozen people who tell me if Jane Street hasn't run into my problem before and solved it, then it's not a real problem and I'm dumb for trying to do it. I can post here or on r/rust (or proggit) and people will tell me that Rust is strictly faster/easier to develop with than any GC language because in the worst case you can always throw `Rc<T>` on everything. I can post on r/python about how hard it is to optimize Python and people will tell me I'm dumb and I can just use multiprocessing, rewrite the slow bits in C/Cython/etc, use numpy/pandas/etc. I can merely register for an account on a Java forum and be berated for my low intelligence. :) > The principle is entirely correct, but its fucking weird that a programming language needs to have a list of "proverbs". I don't feel as strongly as you do, but I agree that proverbs and analogies are pretty low quality and invite more confusion than they address. Probably only a rung above analogies and a rung below quotations. [0]: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nutpicking https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nutpicking
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    > Isn't this just nutpicking[0]? From that article, I'm specifically addressing "Does this movement _promote_ crazies?" I'd argue the sloganeering attracts them like moths to a flame.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      I don't know what is meant by "sloganeering" but if writing a full, nuanced article (e.g., TFA) fits the bill then I'm not sure I agree with your conclusion... In other words, I agree that "sloganeering" attracts the nuts, but I'm not sure I agree that TFA is sloganeering.
Anaminus 5y ago
Sometimes people don't actually want help, they just want to complain. Other people misinterpret this as a question or a debate, so their explanatory responses are received negatively. You'll find that this also applies to C++, Rust, every programming language, and anything in general.