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There are 2 kinds of languages, one that people love to talk about and philosophize about and others that are used in real projects. Golang firmly fits into the

There are 2 kinds of languages, one that people love to talk about and philosophize about and others that are used in real projects. Golang firmly fits into the 2nd category of languages that are highly opinionated and full of pragmatic choices. It is rare for a language to capture so much mindshare within a decade of it's launch and I'm glad that Go had managed to reach this stage. I am really looking forward to what this new era of Golang brings with it.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
I'd add to your first category that there's a lot of languages that adopt features that other languages have, making a ton of languages converge into basically the same language with some caveats. I don't remember the post now but I believe it was posted on HN some time ago, it was pretty insightful. Anyway yeah, I'm glad Go is resistant to change.
- jerf 5y ago
  http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2908 http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2908 ? (BTW, 2011 on that. I would not today agree with the statement "the Haskell community is the only community I know that is doing new things in the field of language and API design". I think Rust is doing interesting new things now. In 2011 they were still working on basic functionality. There's a couple of other interesting little up-and-coming languages.)
- rob74 5y ago
  No idea why you are getting downvoted, but I fully agree with that sentiment. There are already enough open source languages who seemingly want to be "everybody's darling" and implement any reasonably sensible feature request. One example: PHP's new "match" expression (https://www.php.net/manual/en/control-structures.match.php https://www.php.net/manual/en/control-structures.match.php). Of course, I can understand that people like Go's more flexible "switch" better than the "traditional" C-style one, but if a language already has the traditional version, does it really have to add a new one which does mostly the same thing and in doing so cause headaches for thousands of developers who use classes or constants named "match"?
pydry 5y ago
They resisted generics since day 1 on the basis of pragmatism. Now they included them on the basis of pragmatism? I remember something similar with their approach to package management which they said wasnt necessary for years. They really do seem to resist doing the right thing for as long as possible.
- neilalexander 5y ago
  Is it really that much of a bad thing to iterate based on real world experience?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - maleldil 5y ago
    It is when they spend a decade insisting that they right and everyone else was wrong, then ended up doing it anyway. Generics aren't a cutting edge feature that they wanted to see how it would develop. Their objection against it was ideological.
    - neilalexander 5y ago
      I don't really understand this type of criticism. People complained that Go didn't have generics, and now that they've delivered, people still want to complain for some reason. I can quite believe that the Go team wanted to be sure that the approach made sense for Go, that it was the right solution to the right problem and to keep to their backward compatibility promise. Experience is a good teacher. I really don't know why it matters in the slightest that they didn't arrive at that on day one.
    - philosopher1234 5y ago
      Why are you so bitter about it?
    - foldr 5y ago
      >they spend a decade insisting that they right and everyone else was wrong This just isn't how it happened. The Go team never said that they were opposed to generics. Their stance was (i) that it was not a top priority and (ii) that it was difficult problem and they'd take the time to implement generics correctly. The idea that this is about one group of people finally proving that they're 'right' is a distortion based on viewing events though the lens of snarky comments on the internet.
Shadonototra 5y ago
Exactly, just like firefox / chrome you hear about firefox everywhere, everyday, and yet only has 3% marketshare
deleted 5y ago
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Cthulhu_ 5y ago

I'd add to your first category that there's a lot of languages that adopt features that other languages have, making a ton of languages converge into basically the same language with some caveats. I don't remember the post now but I believe it was posted on HN some time ago, it was pretty insightful. Anyway yeah, I'm glad Go is resistant to change.

jerf 5y ago
http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2908 http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2908 ? (BTW, 2011 on that. I would not today agree with the statement "the Haskell community is the only community I know that is doing new things in the field of language and API design". I think Rust is doing interesting new things now. In 2011 they were still working on basic functionality. There's a couple of other interesting little up-and-coming languages.)
rob74 5y ago
No idea why you are getting downvoted, but I fully agree with that sentiment. There are already enough open source languages who seemingly want to be "everybody's darling" and implement any reasonably sensible feature request. One example: PHP's new "match" expression (https://www.php.net/manual/en/control-structures.match.php https://www.php.net/manual/en/control-structures.match.php). Of course, I can understand that people like Go's more flexible "switch" better than the "traditional" C-style one, but if a language already has the traditional version, does it really have to add a new one which does mostly the same thing and in doing so cause headaches for thousands of developers who use classes or constants named "match"?

pydry 5y ago

They resisted generics since day 1 on the basis of pragmatism. Now they included them on the basis of pragmatism? I remember something similar with their approach to package management which they said wasnt necessary for years. They really do seem to resist doing the right thing for as long as possible.

neilalexander 5y ago
Is it really that much of a bad thing to iterate based on real world experience?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- maleldil 5y ago
  It is when they spend a decade insisting that they right and everyone else was wrong, then ended up doing it anyway. Generics aren't a cutting edge feature that they wanted to see how it would develop. Their objection against it was ideological.
  - neilalexander 5y ago
    I don't really understand this type of criticism. People complained that Go didn't have generics, and now that they've delivered, people still want to complain for some reason. I can quite believe that the Go team wanted to be sure that the approach made sense for Go, that it was the right solution to the right problem and to keep to their backward compatibility promise. Experience is a good teacher. I really don't know why it matters in the slightest that they didn't arrive at that on day one.
  - philosopher1234 5y ago
    Why are you so bitter about it?
  - foldr 5y ago
    >they spend a decade insisting that they right and everyone else was wrong This just isn't how it happened. The Go team never said that they were opposed to generics. Their stance was (i) that it was not a top priority and (ii) that it was difficult problem and they'd take the time to implement generics correctly. The idea that this is about one group of people finally proving that they're 'right' is a distortion based on viewing events though the lens of snarky comments on the internet.

Shadonototra 5y ago

Exactly, just like firefox / chrome you hear about firefox everywhere, everyday, and yet only has 3% marketshare

deleted 5y ago

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