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> I think Go people are allergic to writing code that does anything other than functionally work. I think that's what Go was designed for, as a language. To be

> I think Go people are allergic to writing code that does anything other than functionally work. I think that's what Go was designed for, as a language. To be readable, usable. It's uncaring for your personal programming philosophies. I think that's why it's been successful.

danudey 5y ago
Specifically, Go was designed to be effectively and safely writeable and readable by mediocre programmers.
- jhawk28 5y ago
  Mediocre programmers can still write bad Go code. Their code is neither safe or readable.
  - jrockway 5y ago
    Don't take the obvious flamebait. HN's favorite comment on any Go article is "it's designed for bad programmers", implying that if you like it, you're bad at programming. I'm good at programming and like Go, so that implication is clearly false.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      I'm a Go enthusiast, but I think the charitable interpretation is that you don't have to expend lots of mental energy to read and write Go code. Even if you have a lot of mental capacity, you can put the excess toward interesting problems rather than reasoning about object lifetimes or hidden control flow or complex interactions between obscure features. If anyone uses "Go is designed for bad programmers" as an insult to Go programmers, they're only arguing against themselves (and lacking the cognitive faculties to notice).
- geoka9 5y ago
  Some of the best software developers I've seen are mediocre programmers :)
nauticacom 5y ago
I'd agree that it was one of their design goals, but I wouldn't go as far as to say that it makes the language "readable and usable." That depends on what your values are. Go's philosophy (which clearly flows from its creators being C-enthusiasts) is that the only thing that matters for reading, writing, and understanding a program is what it concretely does, i.e. what structures are created, where values are stored, how computations are performed etc. If that's also your philosophy, then of course it's going to jive with you. But plenty of people also have different philosophies. Maybe you think the main thing that's important in crafting programs is developing a rich domain vocabulary that expresses concepts and how they interact. Maybe you think that what's important is formal proof of both logical and concrete correctness. In those cases, Go's rigorous opposition to abstraction (coming from its philosophy that what's important is concrete operations) will probably irritate and slow you down. I couldn't say exactly why it got popular. I'd guess that some significant segment of programmers also share its philosophy, but I have no evidence to back that up. Certainly any reasonably uncontroversial language with a large suite of libraries backed by Google is bound to have some level of popularity.
- opmac 5y ago
  > I couldn't say exactly why it got popular. Probably because it has the backing of Google.
  - ts4z 5y ago
    I disagree. Go provides a low-runtime way of writing programs, like C, without having to resort to managing memory and threads super carefully. No VM, no interpreter, fairly straightforward to imagine what the compiler is doing. You can do the same work in Java but you can't statically link the JVM. You can sort of do these in Python, but the compiler story is murky at best, and the language isn't as type safe.
    - saghm 5y ago
      > No VM, no interpreter That's not quite accurate; there is a runtime, it just gets statically linked into the binary instead of needing to be externally installed
SquishyPanda23 5y ago
> To be readable, usable. Go doesn't particularly value readability or usability. For example, the short variable name convention makes it harder to read code you're unfamiliar with, and there are a number of noticeable usability shortcomings, some of which are mentioned in the article. I think Go's design goals were really to (1) reduce compilation time, which explains why Go has human programmers do work that compilers do in other languages, (2) be statically typed and compiled, so you can use it conveniently for microservices, and (3) have syntax somewhat similar to Python. I think of Go as the successor to Java. Go is to Python as Java was to C++. That, plus the integration with many libraries is why it's taken off in some niches.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  Honestly the biggest selling point of Go to me was that it's simple and consistent. It enforces strong opinions that I may disagree with, but it means everyone does things generally the same way which is an important component in readability. With respect to short variable names, the convention is to only use them for very local scopes (e.g., using `i` as a loop index variable). In particular, I don't need to learn a new language or run a daemon just to compile code with a few dependencies and ship a static binary. Similarly, I don't need to configure CI pipelines just to publish packages or documentation. I don't need an IDE, I don't need to shop around for a test framework or an external web server process because they're built in. I don't have to think about what version of the runtime and/or dependencies are installed on my target system. Plus performance is good and the ecosystem is substantial. Personally from experience, I weight these kinds of concerns a lot higher than whatever bells and whistles are available inside of the language.
LandR 5y ago
I don't find go readable in the slightest, the syntactic bureaucracy is just too high. There is a forest full of code hiding a trees worth of business logic, always. Go is one of the least expressive languages I've ever used.
- preseinger 5y ago
  > the syntactic bureaucracy is too high. Huh? What do you consider syntactic bureaucracy? Go has like 25 keywords and no sigils -- the least "syntactically bureaucratic" language I'm aware of! > Go is one of the least expressive languages I've ever used. This is definitely true. Of course expressiveness is not strictly a virtue!
  - nauticacom 5y ago
    > What do you consider syntactic bureaucracy? I would assume "amount of syntax required to express a given concept," with the use of the word "bureaucracy" implying that some concepts require too much syntax relative to their complexity (something that depends on your values). The classic example being mapping over a slice.
    - preseinger 5y ago
      Ah, so in this framing, syntax is another way of saying amount of code? Here's some Rust code pub fn read(&self) -> u64 { self.counts.values().fold(0, |acc, x| acc + x) } Here's some analogous Go code func (w *Whatever) Read() uint64 { var total uint64 for _, v := range w.values { total += v } return total } The former is certainly fewer characters than the latter. But to me it represents _more_ syntactic bureaucracy, not less. There are more sigils, more language concepts I need to understand, more _types of syntax_ to express the same thing. It's 20% of the SLoC, but parsing it requires more implicit knowledge, and takes no less time, versus parsing the latter. YMMV, of course. None of this is objective.
      - nauticacom 5y ago

danudey 5y ago

Specifically, Go was designed to be effectively and safely writeable and readable by mediocre programmers.

jhawk28 5y ago
Mediocre programmers can still write bad Go code. Their code is neither safe or readable.
- jrockway 5y ago
  Don't take the obvious flamebait. HN's favorite comment on any Go article is "it's designed for bad programmers", implying that if you like it, you're bad at programming. I'm good at programming and like Go, so that implication is clearly false.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    I'm a Go enthusiast, but I think the charitable interpretation is that you don't have to expend lots of mental energy to read and write Go code. Even if you have a lot of mental capacity, you can put the excess toward interesting problems rather than reasoning about object lifetimes or hidden control flow or complex interactions between obscure features. If anyone uses "Go is designed for bad programmers" as an insult to Go programmers, they're only arguing against themselves (and lacking the cognitive faculties to notice).
geoka9 5y ago
Some of the best software developers I've seen are mediocre programmers :)

nauticacom 5y ago

I'd agree that it was one of their design goals, but I wouldn't go as far as to say that it makes the language "readable and usable." That depends on what your values are. Go's philosophy (which clearly flows from its creators being C-enthusiasts) is that the only thing that matters for reading, writing, and understanding a program is what it concretely does, i.e. what structures are created, where values are stored, how computations are performed etc. If that's also your philosophy, then of course it's going to jive with you. But plenty of people also have different philosophies. Maybe you think the main thing that's important in crafting programs is developing a rich domain vocabulary that expresses concepts and how they interact. Maybe you think that what's important is formal proof of both logical and concrete correctness. In those cases, Go's rigorous opposition to abstraction (coming from its philosophy that what's important is concrete operations) will probably irritate and slow you down. I couldn't say exactly why it got popular. I'd guess that some significant segment of programmers also share its philosophy, but I have no evidence to back that up. Certainly any reasonably uncontroversial language with a large suite of libraries backed by Google is bound to have some level of popularity.

opmac 5y ago
> I couldn't say exactly why it got popular. Probably because it has the backing of Google.
- ts4z 5y ago
  I disagree. Go provides a low-runtime way of writing programs, like C, without having to resort to managing memory and threads super carefully. No VM, no interpreter, fairly straightforward to imagine what the compiler is doing. You can do the same work in Java but you can't statically link the JVM. You can sort of do these in Python, but the compiler story is murky at best, and the language isn't as type safe.
  - saghm 5y ago
    > No VM, no interpreter That's not quite accurate; there is a runtime, it just gets statically linked into the binary instead of needing to be externally installed

SquishyPanda23 5y ago

> To be readable, usable. Go doesn't particularly value readability or usability. For example, the short variable name convention makes it harder to read code you're unfamiliar with, and there are a number of noticeable usability shortcomings, some of which are mentioned in the article. I think Go's design goals were really to (1) reduce compilation time, which explains why Go has human programmers do work that compilers do in other languages, (2) be statically typed and compiled, so you can use it conveniently for microservices, and (3) have syntax somewhat similar to Python. I think of Go as the successor to Java. Go is to Python as Java was to C++. That, plus the integration with many libraries is why it's taken off in some niches.

throwaway894345 5y ago
Honestly the biggest selling point of Go to me was that it's simple and consistent. It enforces strong opinions that I may disagree with, but it means everyone does things generally the same way which is an important component in readability. With respect to short variable names, the convention is to only use them for very local scopes (e.g., using `i` as a loop index variable). In particular, I don't need to learn a new language or run a daemon just to compile code with a few dependencies and ship a static binary. Similarly, I don't need to configure CI pipelines just to publish packages or documentation. I don't need an IDE, I don't need to shop around for a test framework or an external web server process because they're built in. I don't have to think about what version of the runtime and/or dependencies are installed on my target system. Plus performance is good and the ecosystem is substantial. Personally from experience, I weight these kinds of concerns a lot higher than whatever bells and whistles are available inside of the language.

LandR 5y ago

I don't find go readable in the slightest, the syntactic bureaucracy is just too high. There is a forest full of code hiding a trees worth of business logic, always. Go is one of the least expressive languages I've ever used.

preseinger 5y ago
> the syntactic bureaucracy is too high. Huh? What do you consider syntactic bureaucracy? Go has like 25 keywords and no sigils -- the least "syntactically bureaucratic" language I'm aware of! > Go is one of the least expressive languages I've ever used. This is definitely true. Of course expressiveness is not strictly a virtue!
- nauticacom 5y ago
  > What do you consider syntactic bureaucracy? I would assume "amount of syntax required to express a given concept," with the use of the word "bureaucracy" implying that some concepts require too much syntax relative to their complexity (something that depends on your values). The classic example being mapping over a slice.
  - preseinger 5y ago
    Ah, so in this framing, syntax is another way of saying amount of code? Here's some Rust code pub fn read(&self) -> u64 { self.counts.values().fold(0, |acc, x| acc + x) } Here's some analogous Go code func (w *Whatever) Read() uint64 { var total uint64 for _, v := range w.values { total += v } return total } The former is certainly fewer characters than the latter. But to me it represents _more_ syntactic bureaucracy, not less. There are more sigils, more language concepts I need to understand, more _types of syntax_ to express the same thing. It's 20% of the SLoC, but parsing it requires more implicit knowledge, and takes no less time, versus parsing the latter. YMMV, of course. None of this is objective.
    - nauticacom 5y ago