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The entire point of Go is that it's designed for less talented programmers, i.e. people who can't understand or don't want to put in the effort to understand th
by andai 3y ago
The entire point of Go is that it's designed for less talented programmers, i.e. people who can't understand or don't want to put in the effort to understand those things.
That's the whole appeal of many programming languages, they massively simplify the mental model (for a price).
I've been a lot happier and more productive since I switched to a slow language (which younger me would have been sad to hear).
- quest88 3y agoYea, competent programmers only write in assembly.
- hu3 3y agoSure if you consider programmers at Uber, Google, Docker/Kubernetes "less talented".
- mardifoufs 3y agoI think they are referring to the famous Robert pike quote (though I disagree that it implies a lack of talent from its users, it just means that the language was designed to be practical): "The key point here is 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 use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt." It's usually used in a tongue in cheek manner to mock Go which is usually pretty funny but it's disingenuous to argue that it seriously implies that go programmers are not talented.
- hu3 3y agoYeah I knew it was referencing that. Thanks. It's just tiresome and lazy to use that misquote and I see that often. I don't even code in Go these days but I hold HN to a higher standards.
- mardifoufs 3y agoCompletely agree. Especially since most languages are designed to be simple and even "stupid simple". That's a good thing! There's nothing inherently smart or talented in having to wrestle with a complicated language just to get stuff done.
- bombolo 3y agogoogle hires thousands of out of college kids… i'm sure not all of them are as good as a seasoned hacker.
- chaxor 3y agoYou misspelled JavaScript
- fakedang 3y agoHonestly, is it just me or do I find Javascript unnaturally difficult? I've learnt Python, C++, MATLAB, heck, even picked up some Rust and LabVIEW on the way. But I found Javascript (and Typescript) hard to pick up.
- andai 3y agoI've spent most of the last 20 years working with JavaScript, and as ridiculous as it sounds, I never quite got the hang of it. Meanwhile other languages clicked within a few days. I had a similar experience with e.g. Flash vs GIMP. Even after a decade of not using it, I found that the Flash shortcuts were intuitive to me, but GIMP (which I use every day, several times per day) never quite "clicks". I'm not exactly sure why this is the case. Another example is that I rarely use Python, and yet find myself vastly more productive in it.
- sublinear 3y agoCrying isn't going to open up the browser to your favorite language, and no the DOM API will never be exposed to WASM. JavaScript is here to stay.
- sdenton4 3y agoThanks to the magic of Turing completeness, lots of the complications don't actually buy you anything... The explicit choice in the design of Go is to prefer fast reading over fast writing, which helps maintainability and debugging. Complex language features are terrible for maintainability: the reader may not know the feature, it may interact in unexpected ways with other language features, or have other non-obvious pitfalls. Debugging these things are ultimately a waste of time, and time is the highest price of all. And for what?
- andai 3y ago(Since it's too late to edit) I believed this to be literally the case, that Go was designed for the "lowest common denominator", i.e. to make that area of programming at Google more accessible than it was previously. Have I been misinformed?