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The only constant is change. Especially with Go, apparently. It's hard to evaluate the comparison of Golang of today to the one I originally discovered 11 yea

The only constant is change. Especially with Go, apparently. It's hard to evaluate the comparison of Golang of today to the one I originally discovered 11 years ago in 2012. Then, it was a breath of fresh air. Nowadays.. I find myself sighing. It works but the joy has faded. Bit rot is life.

mixedCase 4y ago
The joys and woes of reinventing computer programming right where it was left off in the early 70s.
- kubb 4y ago
  I think I can sympathise, it's hard to keep up with all the development in PL, so it's easy to convince yourself that all those new inventions are stupid anyway and you don't need them, you'll do it your way. And then, slowly over a couple of decades, other people will be making it their life's work to add in the things that you thought were stupid because inevitably the need for them surfaces.
  - groestl 4y ago
    Or you've seen an approach fail spectacularly in a programming language you're familiar with, which causes you to throw out the baby with the bath water.
    - metadat 4y ago
      Any specific examples you can share?
      - groestl 4y ago
        A bit tongue in cheek, but I'm just referring to Rob Pike et al., exceptions, and C++. And I must clarify that by "fail spectacularly" I mean solely from the POV of the aspiring language designer, not necessarily from other language users. People enjoy C++ exceptions now, it seems, in combination with RAII, but back then it was probably a different story.
wrycoder 4y ago
Implementors gotta implement, no?
zdragnar 4y ago
How many languages go through the first 11 years of life without significant changes? There are lisps, which have no syntax to change, and I guess elixir, which is itself just a syntax for a very mature runtime (BEAM). Hell, even C underwent pretty major changes from 72 onwards, because every compiler supported entirely different features. Things like void functions and returning structs or unions. Granted, this predated internet distribution of software, so changes overall were perhaps slower within a single implementation, but there were still radical developments happening on a frequent basis.
- kaba0 4y ago
  > How many languages go through the first 11 years of life without significant changes Only if a language with basically zero new concepts could have just learned from the litany of other managed languages’ mistakes..
  - philosopher1234 4y ago
    Can you give an example of a feature where the designers of go failed to consider other languages mistakes? Every discussion of there’s I’ve read has been thoughtful, open, and well cited.
lakomen 4y ago
Yeah I'm not using generics and they're a big turn off. If Rust wasn't so ugly and the JVM so Swiss-cheesy and stuck in paradigms, I would switch. So I keep writing my old ways code in Go and act like the new features don't exist. Big sigh

mixedCase 4y ago

The joys and woes of reinventing computer programming right where it was left off in the early 70s.

kubb 4y ago
I think I can sympathise, it's hard to keep up with all the development in PL, so it's easy to convince yourself that all those new inventions are stupid anyway and you don't need them, you'll do it your way. And then, slowly over a couple of decades, other people will be making it their life's work to add in the things that you thought were stupid because inevitably the need for them surfaces.
- groestl 4y ago
  Or you've seen an approach fail spectacularly in a programming language you're familiar with, which causes you to throw out the baby with the bath water.
  - metadat 4y ago
    Any specific examples you can share?
    - groestl 4y ago
      A bit tongue in cheek, but I'm just referring to Rob Pike et al., exceptions, and C++. And I must clarify that by "fail spectacularly" I mean solely from the POV of the aspiring language designer, not necessarily from other language users. People enjoy C++ exceptions now, it seems, in combination with RAII, but back then it was probably a different story.

wrycoder 4y ago

Implementors gotta implement, no?

zdragnar 4y ago

How many languages go through the first 11 years of life without significant changes? There are lisps, which have no syntax to change, and I guess elixir, which is itself just a syntax for a very mature runtime (BEAM). Hell, even C underwent pretty major changes from 72 onwards, because every compiler supported entirely different features. Things like void functions and returning structs or unions. Granted, this predated internet distribution of software, so changes overall were perhaps slower within a single implementation, but there were still radical developments happening on a frequent basis.

kaba0 4y ago
> How many languages go through the first 11 years of life without significant changes Only if a language with basically zero new concepts could have just learned from the litany of other managed languages’ mistakes..
- philosopher1234 4y ago
  Can you give an example of a feature where the designers of go failed to consider other languages mistakes? Every discussion of there’s I’ve read has been thoughtful, open, and well cited.

lakomen 4y ago

Yeah I'm not using generics and they're a big turn off. If Rust wasn't so ugly and the JVM so Swiss-cheesy and stuck in paradigms, I would switch. So I keep writing my old ways code in Go and act like the new features don't exist. Big sigh