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The people who created Go had vast amounts of experience in creating new useful things. It's not their first system or language. For example, they created unix
by mfer 5y ago
The people who created Go had vast amounts of experience in creating new useful things. It's not their first system or language. For example, they created unix and utf8. Please give them a little credit for their experience and time trying to build things.
Programming languages are there to make programmers productive. Otherwise we would all work in something like assembly (I've done that but try to stay away from it now).
Go attempts to do this by hiding the complexity. When people have to spend time dealing with language (or platform) complexity they have less time to spend on their business logic or the core thing they are trying to do. By making the complex simple for the majority of cases they enable people to be more productive in solving their specific issues.
I say all of this as someone who likes and has issues with both Go and Rust. And, every language I've ever used.
- kitd 5y agoProgramming languages are there to make programmers productive 100% agree and I find I can produce more software value [1] per unit time/effort in Golang than anything else. Is it the perfect language? No, there are certainly some warts, but no show-stoppers, and no more than other languages. [1] "software value" being defined as software that meets its requirements, is easy to write and build initially, easy to maintain by others, and performant enough not to need extra-ordinary hardware.
- azth 5y agoJust because they created an OS and a character encoding does not mean that they are automatically good at creating programming languages.
- philosopher1234 5y agonor did he say it did. the point of listing their credentials was to request a more sympathetic ear. if you're intent on seeing only the bad side of go, then no one will be able to convince you. taking a sympathetic perspective is required to truly understand the language and its utility.
- azth 5y agoI've used both in production settings, a sympathetic perspective doesn't help :)
- philosopher1234 5y agoAs have I, heavily, and it did.
- mfer 5y agoGo wasn't their first programming language. For example, one of them started the B language. Another one of them created Sawzall, a domain specific programming language. Have you looked at the history of the creators of Go? If not, I would suggest looking into it. 2 of the 3 have an amazing history in terms of computing.
- azth 5y agoI have, and it proves my argument. Limbo went nowhere when it was developed under AT&T for example.
- kaba0 5y agoCan you tell me anything novel about go? It’s not even a novel combination of features.
- philosopher1234 5y agoSince when is novelty the cardinal virtue of a programming language? In my book "usefulness" is more important than novelty for professional dev work (the opposite is true for hobby work, typically). I think Go is notable for its scarcity. It has few features which interact well together. It is extremely light in abstraction, so understanding whats really going on takes far less work than basically any other language out there (maybe C is a competitor here, but C is hard to understand for other reasons). Simplicity is not novel, but it allows the programmer to forget about questions which have little relevance to the problem they're trying to solve (e.g whats the ideal type structure for this program) and focus on questions more like "how should this work". It's a language that recognizes that cleaning your room by stuffing your clothes under the bed actually works in programming.
- thegeekpirate 5y agoHere's a comment I made ~four years ago regarding what I consider to be the combination of essential features that no other language has, and it's only gotten better since then: https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/76k7x1/when_people_dont_believe_you_that_c_is_still_used/dof9xck/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/76k7x1/whe...