4 ms·

It has always been surprising to me how primitive Go really is, for no really good reason. I understand the evolution of C, it made perfect sense back when it

It has always been surprising to me how primitive Go really is, for no really good reason. I understand the evolution of C, it made perfect sense back when it was invented. And the limitations were necessary due to the wide array of architectures and extremely limited computers of the time in every dimension (CPU speed, IO speed, RAM size, disk size, etc). Many of those dimensions have been improved by several orders of magnitude, and both compilers and runtimes can afford to be comprehensive. Yet we get this ham-strung language out of the gate. Very disappointing.

pjmlp 3y ago
It is basically Limbo with updated syntax, and AOT instead of a JIT.
andreimackenzie 3y ago
Simplicity is a feature. Sure, how complicated can effective enums really be, but Go's general philosophy is to think hard (& sometimes for a long time) before adding every bell and whistle. I have a far easier time delving in to previously unknown Go code for the first time compared to something like Scala (or even Java). Go is a solid language for those who value that and want to enable the experience for others.
- Scubabear68 3y ago
  Simplicity can be taken too far. Take this to its logical close cousin and you would have Forth or Basic. Also, we have been doing computer language design for quite awhile now. This isn’t a new frontier. The deficiencies in Go aren’t in areas of “oh, we never thought of that!”, but are in very well known areas with known solutions. I find Go code is obscured with house keeping code that isn’t necessary in better languages.
- OhSoHumble 3y ago
  That simplicity can lead to more complex and hard to read/support code. For example, to encode a JSON structure with a dynamic top-level key you need to write a custom marshaller OR marshal twice. That's... awful. Like bonkers level insane.
geodel 3y ago
Very disappointing. Disappointing it maybe but productive it is not considering people can easily move to far better languages.
bedobi 3y ago
You're right. Go is not simple, it is idiotically designed to deliberately exclude common sense features that ironically makes it less simple and more error prone to code in and read Go. Other languages are objectively better than Go for every imaginable use case. Rust is better for embedded. Kotlin is better for back end. I could go on. The creator of Go is very open and candid that he thinks his target audience, Google Engineers, are too stupid to use "advanced" features like oh I don't know, sane error handling? and any number of basic things other languages have. I know how cringe it is to start flame wars about programming languages, but srsly, Go, PHP, Perl, JS and a few others really are objectively worse (for every context and use case) than widely used alternatives.
- yhavr 3y ago
  > sane error handling? Golang _has_ sane error handling. It just considers errors a normal and expected situation. When you perform a http request, and the result is successful you expect the result to be assigned a variable, right? Then why would you expect non-successful outcome to be returned in a different way? Why is it different? Why do you unwind the stack? Something terrible happened? Definitely not, it's as real life as 200 OK. For unrecoverable things golang has panics, and if you don't like the idiomatic way of handling errors, you can just throw them like exceptions.
  - bedobi 3y ago
    100% agree, and Go gets oh so close But the correct and only sane way to do this is Either<Error, Success> that you can then pass on, map over both or either of the two, flatMap to chain with other Eithers, fold into a single thing etc etc. Not endless sprinkling of if err != nil { log.Fatal(err) } everywhere (and no, those operations are not obscure, esoteric or difficult to learn or understand - they're the same for other types like Option, List etc and are trivial to learn in a day for people who aren't familiar with them) + not making the compiler distinguish between null and non-nully values (as eg Kotlin, Rust and Haskell does) in itself as well is inexcusable for a modern language
    - 3y ago

pjmlp 3y ago

It is basically Limbo with updated syntax, and AOT instead of a JIT.

andreimackenzie 3y ago

Simplicity is a feature. Sure, how complicated can effective enums really be, but Go's general philosophy is to think hard (& sometimes for a long time) before adding every bell and whistle. I have a far easier time delving in to previously unknown Go code for the first time compared to something like Scala (or even Java). Go is a solid language for those who value that and want to enable the experience for others.

Scubabear68 3y ago
Simplicity can be taken too far. Take this to its logical close cousin and you would have Forth or Basic. Also, we have been doing computer language design for quite awhile now. This isn’t a new frontier. The deficiencies in Go aren’t in areas of “oh, we never thought of that!”, but are in very well known areas with known solutions. I find Go code is obscured with house keeping code that isn’t necessary in better languages.
OhSoHumble 3y ago
That simplicity can lead to more complex and hard to read/support code. For example, to encode a JSON structure with a dynamic top-level key you need to write a custom marshaller OR marshal twice. That's... awful. Like bonkers level insane.

geodel 3y ago

Very disappointing. Disappointing it maybe but productive it is not considering people can easily move to far better languages.

bedobi 3y ago

You're right. Go is not simple, it is idiotically designed to deliberately exclude common sense features that ironically makes it less simple and more error prone to code in and read Go. Other languages are objectively better than Go for every imaginable use case. Rust is better for embedded. Kotlin is better for back end. I could go on. The creator of Go is very open and candid that he thinks his target audience, Google Engineers, are too stupid to use "advanced" features like oh I don't know, sane error handling? and any number of basic things other languages have. I know how cringe it is to start flame wars about programming languages, but srsly, Go, PHP, Perl, JS and a few others really are objectively worse (for every context and use case) than widely used alternatives.

yhavr 3y ago
> sane error handling? Golang _has_ sane error handling. It just considers errors a normal and expected situation. When you perform a http request, and the result is successful you expect the result to be assigned a variable, right? Then why would you expect non-successful outcome to be returned in a different way? Why is it different? Why do you unwind the stack? Something terrible happened? Definitely not, it's as real life as 200 OK. For unrecoverable things golang has panics, and if you don't like the idiomatic way of handling errors, you can just throw them like exceptions.
- bedobi 3y ago
  100% agree, and Go gets oh so close But the correct and only sane way to do this is Either<Error, Success> that you can then pass on, map over both or either of the two, flatMap to chain with other Eithers, fold into a single thing etc etc. Not endless sprinkling of if err != nil { log.Fatal(err) } everywhere (and no, those operations are not obscure, esoteric or difficult to learn or understand - they're the same for other types like Option, List etc and are trivial to learn in a day for people who aren't familiar with them) + not making the compiler distinguish between null and non-nully values (as eg Kotlin, Rust and Haskell does) in itself as well is inexcusable for a modern language
  - 3y ago