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Go has a lot of issues. Some of them would be easily fixable if people promoting and developing Go actually admitted the problems. However, the fanbase usually

Go has a lot of issues. Some of them would be easily fixable if people promoting and developing Go actually admitted the problems. However, the fanbase usually acts as a cult pretending that issues are features. Thing is, just like broken, hackish dependency "management" had to be fixed (introducing tons of complexity for the sake of not destroying backward compatibility), other problems will have to be fixed as well. It will add even more complexity to the language. For example, Go error handling is shit. People will attempt to fix it with generics now and that will create a lot of inconsistency between different APIs. Because of those inconsistencies the entire language will loose any possibility of elegant, high-level, pre-packaged solutions for certain things (like automated logging, recovery, etc.) This loss will be permanent and the vast majority of users won't even understand why some things are so hard.

deleted 4y ago
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throwaway894345 4y ago
I mean, all programming language communities are partial to their language, but among Go there seems to be an unusual tolerance for disagreement and discussion of language issues compared to most other programming languages. But yeah, when you come in guns blazing talking about how certain language features are "shit" and there's no possibility of elegance, people are rightly going to think you're not there for any sort of productive conversation. For example, I regularly have productive conversations with people in the community about error handling and sum types and generics, including my criticism for the way Go does some of those features. A little civility goes a long way, and this isn't particular to the Go community or even programming language communities in general. Note that there definitely are PL communities that generally can't handle any criticism irrespective of civility, but the Go community isn't among them. Indeed, in my experience, Go's critics are very often much more zealous than its proponents.
- burnished 4y ago
  Huh, I had sort of found the opposite, that the Go community I had interacted with was more aggro and prone to offense. I'm forming this opinion from the reddit and the discord though, so if there is another community you favor I'd genuinely love to hear about it.
  - kodah 4y ago
    Last I checked there GoNuts on Libera, there's the go nuts mailing list, and there's that Slack. I've seen members of all of the above complain and publicly vye for features and fixes.
  - throwaway894345 4y ago
    I've had very helpful experiences on Discord (but I don't frequent it). Reddit is Reddit. GitHub (e.g., issue tracker) has been very productive. The mailing list is also productive.
  - lakomen 4y ago
    I concur. I was used to a professional tone, then joined discord-go. Showed some of my online code to receive a "shit structure" response by some anime girl avatar youngling. When I started explaining how I don't think docker is the way to go I was met with passive aggressive behavior and plain false responses trying to justify its use. But Go's discord server wasn't to only bad experience. Angular might as well have been called Heil Angular. I worked with it for 2 years and found vue to be more productive. But they didn't want to hear cross worlds experience. Instead they insisted that I had no clue and after a while of back n forth played the "we're the moderators so we're right" card. Then big daddy server owner later stepped up and in the end I was banned, because despite the truth that vue was more productive only their agenda mattered. I have also met hostility in discord's vue server. Insults by by an official name there for saying that it wasn't a good move to require me or anyone joining to provide a phone number for account verification purposes. All in all discord seem to have the immature unprofessional crowd. It's a gaming chat system after all. Reddit Go is not as hostile but not very informed either. Although that's not true for all participants. Compare Reddit to the quality of Go nuts, there is a difference. But at least Reddit is a more or less open forum, where discord is hidden and a walled pff property.
- mjr00 4y ago
  > Note that there definitely are PL communities that generally can't handle any criticism irrespective of civility, but the Go community isn't among them. Indeed, in my experience, Go's critics are very often much more zealous than its proponents. This is because Go is a programming language for people who don't care about programming languages. I mean this in the most positive way possible. If you're using Go, it's because you care about the end result of what you're building, usually a backend service or command-line tooling, far more than the code that was used to create it. Go is not a language where you come up with clever syntax to solve your problem. Go is not a language that makes you feel smart when you write it. Go is not a fun language to program in. Go is a language that gets out of your way, encourages you to solve your problem in the most boring way possible (usually with a lot of for loops) with a predefined level of safety (i.e. static typing, explicit error handling with the `error` type, etc). It's a language for building bridges, not creating masterpieces. People who are passionate about programming languages would never like Go in the first place, so you don't get too many zealots to sing its praises.
  - jhoechtl 4y ago
    Well put and I agree with most points but > Go is not a fun language to program in Not having to think about how something should be done in the most elegant way, instead focus on the problem at hand is a lot of "fun"
    - throwaway894345 4y ago
      Agreed. This was the only nit I was inclined to pick as well. I have a lot of fun writing Go, because it gets out of my way.
      - afdbcreid 4y ago
        But programming languages should get on your way while you're doing things wrong. Go does not. To be fare, most mainstream languages do not: I think Rust is the best in this thing, other languages often aren't. But Go is by far the worst of all, because of its striving for "simplicity".
the_common_man 4y ago
> For example, Go error handling is shit What is bad about it?
- mcronce 4y ago
  It requires several additional lines of code just to bubble up an error, for starters, and there's nothing stopping you from ignoring errors and continuing with what could easily be corrupt data.
  - the_common_man 4y ago
    > It requires several additional lines of code just to bubble up an error I mean people hate exceptions for a reason (other than in Java world).
    - kaba0 4y ago
      And what is that reason?
  - throwaway894345 4y ago
    The latter is a much stronger argument than the former (no idea why people get so worked up about character counts), but even then, "shit" is really strong considering how often one experiences exception traces when using an application written in Python or Java or some other exception-based language. Point being, we should probably evaluate error handling schemes based on results rather than ideology (even though I tend to agree with some of that ideology).
    - mcronce 4y ago
      Screen real estate is limited, especially vertical real estate. Compared to languages with saner error handling, I can read approximately 25% as much Go code at once. That's a real cognitive burden when maintaining code or learning your way around a new codebase, which seems especially egregious from a language whose community consistently proselytizes about how the lack of language features is great for maintainability and onboarding. I'd take exceptions any day of the week over Go's solution. I'd much rather the program crash by default than attempt to continue with corrupt data by default. I'd rather have concise, explicit, compiler-required error handling than exceptions, though.
ryandvm 4y ago
> the fanbase usually acts as a cult pretending that issues are features JavaScript kind of went through the same thing a few years ago. While everybody else was complaining about Callback Hell, the JS guys were insisting it wasn't a problem. Then they added promises, and later async/await. And lo and behold, what wasn't a problem eventually got fixed. For a while you would constantly find folks on forums saying, "yeah JavaScript used to be shit, but with ES* it's now perfect." This went on for years. I think the cultish "we like it this way" is just basic human programming. We do it with items we purchase, political parties we've joined, cities we live in, programming languages, everything.
- alehlopeh 4y ago
  “The JS guys” is not a thing. I want to say that grouping everyone that uses JS into a single entity is a bad thing, but it’s not even clear whether you’re referring to JS users or the shadowy JS powers that be.
robonerd 4y ago
> However, the fanbase usually acts as a cult pretending that issues are features. Per Rob Pike (Lang NEXT 2014), golang was created for fairly young programmers that are fresh out of school and don't know many other languages. So, something I've observed: When somebody doesn't know many things but is building a career, planning their life, on one of the things they know, they're going to take that one thing more personally. This is why it's good for people to be exposed to a diversity of ideas early on. Early exposure to diverse ideas helps engineers reason about tools and systems more objectively, with less input from their ego.
- vrnvu 4y ago
  Do you have any data or survey to back your statement? Forgive me if I've misunderstood you but are you saying that Golang is mostly used by young programmers? In my experience most Golang developers are highly experienced... Same with Rust.
  - robonerd 4y ago
    There are two parts of my comment. The first part paraphrases what Rob Pike said about the purpose of Golang, in his presentation at Lang NEXT 2014: > "The key point here is that our programmers are Googlers, they're not researchers. They're typically fairly young, fresh out of school. Probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They're not capable of understanding a brilliant language. But we want to be able to use them to build good software. And so the language we give them needs to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt." The second part is based on my personal observations of human nature. Young and relatively inexperienced engineers often form a sort of personal attachment to whatever technology is enabling their new career. With this personal attachment comes a perception of attack against their person when that technology is criticized. This is a broad phenomena, not unique to golang by any means, but golang happens to be one of the languages that is popular with and promoted to young engineers. In discussions critical about golang, or javascript, or C, or python, there will often be young or otherwise inexperienced engineers interpreting criticism of the tool to be personal attacks.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
cdelsolar 4y ago
> Go error handling is shit. See, if you actually think this, then there can be no common ground here. Just use other languages and stop complaining.

deleted 4y ago

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throwaway894345 4y ago

I mean, all programming language communities are partial to their language, but among Go there seems to be an unusual tolerance for disagreement and discussion of language issues compared to most other programming languages. But yeah, when you come in guns blazing talking about how certain language features are "shit" and there's no possibility of elegance, people are rightly going to think you're not there for any sort of productive conversation. For example, I regularly have productive conversations with people in the community about error handling and sum types and generics, including my criticism for the way Go does some of those features. A little civility goes a long way, and this isn't particular to the Go community or even programming language communities in general. Note that there definitely are PL communities that generally can't handle any criticism irrespective of civility, but the Go community isn't among them. Indeed, in my experience, Go's critics are very often much more zealous than its proponents.

burnished 4y ago
Huh, I had sort of found the opposite, that the Go community I had interacted with was more aggro and prone to offense. I'm forming this opinion from the reddit and the discord though, so if there is another community you favor I'd genuinely love to hear about it.
- kodah 4y ago
  Last I checked there GoNuts on Libera, there's the go nuts mailing list, and there's that Slack. I've seen members of all of the above complain and publicly vye for features and fixes.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  I've had very helpful experiences on Discord (but I don't frequent it). Reddit is Reddit. GitHub (e.g., issue tracker) has been very productive. The mailing list is also productive.
- lakomen 4y ago
  I concur. I was used to a professional tone, then joined discord-go. Showed some of my online code to receive a "shit structure" response by some anime girl avatar youngling. When I started explaining how I don't think docker is the way to go I was met with passive aggressive behavior and plain false responses trying to justify its use. But Go's discord server wasn't to only bad experience. Angular might as well have been called Heil Angular. I worked with it for 2 years and found vue to be more productive. But they didn't want to hear cross worlds experience. Instead they insisted that I had no clue and after a while of back n forth played the "we're the moderators so we're right" card. Then big daddy server owner later stepped up and in the end I was banned, because despite the truth that vue was more productive only their agenda mattered. I have also met hostility in discord's vue server. Insults by by an official name there for saying that it wasn't a good move to require me or anyone joining to provide a phone number for account verification purposes. All in all discord seem to have the immature unprofessional crowd. It's a gaming chat system after all. Reddit Go is not as hostile but not very informed either. Although that's not true for all participants. Compare Reddit to the quality of Go nuts, there is a difference. But at least Reddit is a more or less open forum, where discord is hidden and a walled pff property.
mjr00 4y ago
> Note that there definitely are PL communities that generally can't handle any criticism irrespective of civility, but the Go community isn't among them. Indeed, in my experience, Go's critics are very often much more zealous than its proponents. This is because Go is a programming language for people who don't care about programming languages. I mean this in the most positive way possible. If you're using Go, it's because you care about the end result of what you're building, usually a backend service or command-line tooling, far more than the code that was used to create it. Go is not a language where you come up with clever syntax to solve your problem. Go is not a language that makes you feel smart when you write it. Go is not a fun language to program in. Go is a language that gets out of your way, encourages you to solve your problem in the most boring way possible (usually with a lot of for loops) with a predefined level of safety (i.e. static typing, explicit error handling with the `error` type, etc). It's a language for building bridges, not creating masterpieces. People who are passionate about programming languages would never like Go in the first place, so you don't get too many zealots to sing its praises.
- jhoechtl 4y ago
  Well put and I agree with most points but > Go is not a fun language to program in Not having to think about how something should be done in the most elegant way, instead focus on the problem at hand is a lot of "fun"
  - throwaway894345 4y ago
    Agreed. This was the only nit I was inclined to pick as well. I have a lot of fun writing Go, because it gets out of my way.
    - afdbcreid 4y ago
      But programming languages should get on your way while you're doing things wrong. Go does not. To be fare, most mainstream languages do not: I think Rust is the best in this thing, other languages often aren't. But Go is by far the worst of all, because of its striving for "simplicity".

the_common_man 4y ago

> For example, Go error handling is shit What is bad about it?

mcronce 4y ago
It requires several additional lines of code just to bubble up an error, for starters, and there's nothing stopping you from ignoring errors and continuing with what could easily be corrupt data.
- the_common_man 4y ago
  > It requires several additional lines of code just to bubble up an error I mean people hate exceptions for a reason (other than in Java world).
  - kaba0 4y ago
    And what is that reason?
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  The latter is a much stronger argument than the former (no idea why people get so worked up about character counts), but even then, "shit" is really strong considering how often one experiences exception traces when using an application written in Python or Java or some other exception-based language. Point being, we should probably evaluate error handling schemes based on results rather than ideology (even though I tend to agree with some of that ideology).
  - mcronce 4y ago
    Screen real estate is limited, especially vertical real estate. Compared to languages with saner error handling, I can read approximately 25% as much Go code at once. That's a real cognitive burden when maintaining code or learning your way around a new codebase, which seems especially egregious from a language whose community consistently proselytizes about how the lack of language features is great for maintainability and onboarding. I'd take exceptions any day of the week over Go's solution. I'd much rather the program crash by default than attempt to continue with corrupt data by default. I'd rather have concise, explicit, compiler-required error handling than exceptions, though.

ryandvm 4y ago

> the fanbase usually acts as a cult pretending that issues are features JavaScript kind of went through the same thing a few years ago. While everybody else was complaining about Callback Hell, the JS guys were insisting it wasn't a problem. Then they added promises, and later async/await. And lo and behold, what wasn't a problem eventually got fixed. For a while you would constantly find folks on forums saying, "yeah JavaScript used to be shit, but with ES* it's now perfect." This went on for years. I think the cultish "we like it this way" is just basic human programming. We do it with items we purchase, political parties we've joined, cities we live in, programming languages, everything.

alehlopeh 4y ago
“The JS guys” is not a thing. I want to say that grouping everyone that uses JS into a single entity is a bad thing, but it’s not even clear whether you’re referring to JS users or the shadowy JS powers that be.

robonerd 4y ago

> However, the fanbase usually acts as a cult pretending that issues are features. Per Rob Pike (Lang NEXT 2014), golang was created for fairly young programmers that are fresh out of school and don't know many other languages. So, something I've observed: When somebody doesn't know many things but is building a career, planning their life, on one of the things they know, they're going to take that one thing more personally. This is why it's good for people to be exposed to a diversity of ideas early on. Early exposure to diverse ideas helps engineers reason about tools and systems more objectively, with less input from their ego.

vrnvu 4y ago
Do you have any data or survey to back your statement? Forgive me if I've misunderstood you but are you saying that Golang is mostly used by young programmers? In my experience most Golang developers are highly experienced... Same with Rust.
- robonerd 4y ago
  There are two parts of my comment. The first part paraphrases what Rob Pike said about the purpose of Golang, in his presentation at Lang NEXT 2014: > "The key point here is that our programmers are Googlers, they're not researchers. They're typically fairly young, fresh out of school. Probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They're not capable of understanding a brilliant language. But we want to be able to use them to build good software. And so the language we give them needs to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt." The second part is based on my personal observations of human nature. Young and relatively inexperienced engineers often form a sort of personal attachment to whatever technology is enabling their new career. With this personal attachment comes a perception of attack against their person when that technology is criticized. This is a broad phenomena, not unique to golang by any means, but golang happens to be one of the languages that is popular with and promoted to young engineers. In discussions critical about golang, or javascript, or C, or python, there will often be young or otherwise inexperienced engineers interpreting criticism of the tool to be personal attacks.
- pjmlp 4y ago

cdelsolar 4y ago

> Go error handling is shit. See, if you actually think this, then there can be no common ground here. Just use other languages and stop complaining.