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Don't fall prey to an ad-hominem argument - I don't think your article negatively hints at any kind of 'this is a Rust fanboy-made praise text' and it saddens m

by fb03 4y ago

Don't fall prey to an ad-hominem argument - I don't think your article negatively hints at any kind of 'this is a Rust fanboy-made praise text' and it saddens me that a genuinely legit article like this needs to have the author defend himself like this. Your points were well explained. Go has several serious warts which, in my own opinion, are showstoppers, and you are comparing it to a language which is somewhat newer and had more time to mature and of course, learn from other designs and their decisions as well. Generics were intentionally left out, for example, because of the fear-mongering claim that "if you have generics your code is going to automatically become the C++'s STL at some point". After many years, the lack of even minimal generics got so bad they figured they'd start to lose share to rising languages like Nim, Rust and even the old grandpa C#, now portable everywhere with the Core stuff. It is very clear how badly bolted and rushed generics were in Go. Rust has its warts as well and the language spec is already starting to become somewhat... large. We need to be careful not to invent C++2.0 right? ;-) Anyways, just wanted to say this to you in hopes it'd lighten the mood and validate that you are in a good path with these articles. It was a very insightful reading for me. Thank you.

mseepgood 4y ago
> Rust has its warts as well and the language spec is already starting to become somewhat... large It doesn't have a spec, so we don't know how gigantic it would be.
- cesarb 4y ago
  > It doesn't have a spec, so we don't know how gigantic it would be. While it's not a formal spec, there is https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/index.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/index.html which can give an idea of the size a Rust spec would have.
geodel 4y ago
Tone matters a lot. Just being strictly, technically correct does not get much far, specially in these times. Its funny that author put in scathing, personalized review of Go but then act surprised that some Go fans took that personally. At least in Go case it is just random Go fans dismissing criticism. Go authors do not jump in to defend language at every internet posting. This is absolutely not the case with Rust where committers just pop-in everywhere language/ecosystem is criticised.
foldr 4y ago
>It is very clear how badly bolted and rushed generics were in Go. They were designed with the help of type system experts like Phil Wadler: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.1171 https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.1171 Not sure why you think they were 'rushed', given the timeframe involved.
- fb03 4y ago
  I don't follow. The Arxiv link you provided lacks a single mention to the name you mentioned... and even without knowing him, I can believe you that Mr. Wadler is probably a prominent and important type-theory researcher. But unless your argument is about a reverse ad hominem (citing an important name for the sake of "important person participated in this, cannot criticize design/execution"), I cannot see the point of this at all. Explaining further: When I mentioned "rushed", it was clear for most of us that "generics" appeared quite late in the Golang picture, and it did only rise in priority when they figured they were losing market share to 15yo+ languages because of this single design flaw. Also, as soon as it became a heated topic, the working group started racing to have it included as soon as possible. As early as Go 1.17. Then, in the last moment, it got pushed to 1.18 because several deep questions remained open. Why the need to race it so much for .17, I ask? They probably felt it was 'too late' so must get it out of the door as soon as possible, even build hype for it on .17 in several changelogs even though it was clearly not ready (and those who were following the working group discussions know that it would NEVER be done for the .17 release). Hope I was able to shed some light on the reasoning and word choices I had in my previous answer.
  - foldr 4y ago
    >Then, in the last moment, it got pushed to 1.18 because several deep questions remained open. Delaying a feature to make sure that it's implemented correctly is the exact the opposite of rushing it! I think you are vastly overestimating the influence of internet message board drama on the actions of the Go core team. In any case, you provide no evidence to support your claims about their motivations. I'm not sure what happened with that Arxiv link, but here is another link to the paper I was thinking of: https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/fg/fg.pdf https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/fg/fg.pdf The fact that a leading researcher in type systems was a key participant in the effort suggests that this was a carefully thought through proposal (not necessarily perfect or beyond criticism, but not a rush job). Of course, if you think otherwise, you can point to any specific flaws in the paper. >reverse ad hominem The term you're looking for is 'argument from authority'. But argument from authority isn't really a fallacy. It's perfectly sensible to trust authorities, within reasonable limits.

by fb03 4y ago

mseepgood 4y ago

> Rust has its warts as well and the language spec is already starting to become somewhat... large It doesn't have a spec, so we don't know how gigantic it would be.

cesarb 4y ago
> It doesn't have a spec, so we don't know how gigantic it would be. While it's not a formal spec, there is https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/index.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/index.html which can give an idea of the size a Rust spec would have.

geodel 4y ago

Tone matters a lot. Just being strictly, technically correct does not get much far, specially in these times. Its funny that author put in scathing, personalized review of Go but then act surprised that some Go fans took that personally. At least in Go case it is just random Go fans dismissing criticism. Go authors do not jump in to defend language at every internet posting. This is absolutely not the case with Rust where committers just pop-in everywhere language/ecosystem is criticised.

foldr 4y ago

>It is very clear how badly bolted and rushed generics were in Go. They were designed with the help of type system experts like Phil Wadler: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.1171 https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.1171 Not sure why you think they were 'rushed', given the timeframe involved.

fb03 4y ago
I don't follow. The Arxiv link you provided lacks a single mention to the name you mentioned... and even without knowing him, I can believe you that Mr. Wadler is probably a prominent and important type-theory researcher. But unless your argument is about a reverse ad hominem (citing an important name for the sake of "important person participated in this, cannot criticize design/execution"), I cannot see the point of this at all. Explaining further: When I mentioned "rushed", it was clear for most of us that "generics" appeared quite late in the Golang picture, and it did only rise in priority when they figured they were losing market share to 15yo+ languages because of this single design flaw. Also, as soon as it became a heated topic, the working group started racing to have it included as soon as possible. As early as Go 1.17. Then, in the last moment, it got pushed to 1.18 because several deep questions remained open. Why the need to race it so much for .17, I ask? They probably felt it was 'too late' so must get it out of the door as soon as possible, even build hype for it on .17 in several changelogs even though it was clearly not ready (and those who were following the working group discussions know that it would NEVER be done for the .17 release). Hope I was able to shed some light on the reasoning and word choices I had in my previous answer.
- foldr 4y ago
  >Then, in the last moment, it got pushed to 1.18 because several deep questions remained open. Delaying a feature to make sure that it's implemented correctly is the exact the opposite of rushing it! I think you are vastly overestimating the influence of internet message board drama on the actions of the Go core team. In any case, you provide no evidence to support your claims about their motivations. I'm not sure what happened with that Arxiv link, but here is another link to the paper I was thinking of: https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/fg/fg.pdf https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/fg/fg.pdf The fact that a leading researcher in type systems was a key participant in the effort suggests that this was a carefully thought through proposal (not necessarily perfect or beyond criticism, but not a rush job). Of course, if you think otherwise, you can point to any specific flaws in the paper. >reverse ad hominem The term you're looking for is 'argument from authority'. But argument from authority isn't really a fallacy. It's perfectly sensible to trust authorities, within reasonable limits.