7 ms·

slowly implementing all the things they said we didn't need

by h1fra 4mo ago

TheChaplain 4mo ago
It's not a bad thing to realize that one can be wrong and then strive for change.
- a-french-anon 4mo ago
  Maybe, but personally I've become quite tired of programming languages "organically grown" as opposed to properly designed the first time. After a good decade of C then C++, I found ANSI CL (despite being a massive compromise and unfinished) much more coherent and complete than both.
  - ramon156 4mo ago
    So which language had it right from the start? is there a language that has a very low rewrite status?
    - bbkane 4mo ago
      I'd particularly like examples of statically typed languages that "got it right" (since I love me my types)
      - galangalalgol 4mo ago
        Ocaml maybe? Multi threading didn't seem necessary and introduced the possibility of data races.
    - maccard 4mo ago
      That’s whataboutism - no language is perfect, but given when go released it’s fair to hold them to a higher standard than languages what were designed 25 years earlier. As an aside - D, Zig, Rust, even typescript got most of the lessons learned from C right
      - blanched 4mo ago
        I'm not familiar with D, but Zig and Rust are well-known for continuously evolving. Zig has the (in)famous "Writergate": https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/24329 https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/24329 And besides Rust's high count of RFCs, there are things like async (I'm not complaining about it, but its an obvious large-scale "change"), module system changes, etc. (To be clear, I like both languages a lot. But I wouldn't call them slow moving or right from the start.)
      - Maxatar 4mo ago
        D literally can't even maintain backwards compatibility between minor version updates not to mention a big part of the D community left when D reinvented itself with D2. Among languages it's probably the one that is constantly in a state of flux.
        Kapendev 4mo ago
        Really? Wow, this is like Zig and I love Zig!
        sunsetSamurai 4mo ago
        what's a big project built with D? I feel it gets mentioned a lot on hackernews but I've never run into any project using it in the wild.
        Kapendev 4mo ago
        Flutter
        sieabahlpark 4mo ago
        [dead]
    - poncho_romero 4mo ago
      I think Elixir is a good candidate here. It's small, coherent, and composes well, and (at least to my understanding) the authors consider the language finished, with no new major features planned.
      - sunsetSamurai 4mo ago
        Elixir is missing static types though, it's hard to go back to work on dynamic languages.
        shakow 4mo ago
        Hopefully, it's coming. https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2023/06/22/type-system-updates-research-dev/ https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2023/06/22/type-system-updates-...
  - ndr 4mo ago
    "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." -- Greenspun's tenth rule He had some lack of conviction to scope it so narrowly.
  - bbkane 4mo ago
    I know Go is justly criticized for many of its design decisions, but it still feels well-designed and "small" to me in day to day usage when many other languages don't.
    - a-french-anon 4mo ago
      Eh, the thing with generics coming late is pretty much what I meant by "organically grown". My best litmus test these days is support for multidimensional arrays because it's always needed at some point in general purpose languages. CL and Ada had it right from the start while C++ needed C++23/26 to get std::mdspan and we still need to wrap it to pass the underlying/owned memory pool around (https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Multi-dimensional_array https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Multi-dimensional_array for more).
      - nish__ 4mo ago
        Doesn't every language support multidimensional arrays? It's just an array of arrays, no? What am I missing?
        School-Cotton 4mo ago
        An array of arrays is an extremely inefficient and error-prone way to represent multidimensional arrays. If I want a 1000x1000 array, representing it physically as a single 1000000-element array requires one allocation, and processing it element-by-element (assuming it's stored in the same order we're iterating over it) is sequential in memory and therefore very efficient. Representing it as 1000 separate 1000-element arrays requires 1000 allocations, and pointer-chasing every time we move from one row to the next.
        nish__ 4mo ago
        I see. That makes sense.
        j_w 4mo ago
        Isn't an array of arrays by definition the sequential implementation? Otherwise you would have an array of pointers to arrays. The usage (syntax) for them would be the same but the performance would not be. They also have different uses. You would expect an array of arrays to be an array of arrays which share the same length. For an array of pointers to an array you would expect dynamic length arrays contained within the original array. Even in c++ could you not just define some int [1000][1000]foo? I've never really used C++ but my C knowledge assumption is that is 1000000 continuous elements.
  - xscott 4mo ago
    Scheme is (or at least was) coherent. You don't need to look any further than set/setf/setq to see that Common Lisp is "organically grown" from the fertilizer of a committee. CL does its best to make every other lisp more attractive.
    - rootnod3 4mo ago
      Which Scheme are we talking about? R5RS? R7RS-small? R6RS? With SRFIs? Without? Which scheme? Is it `(library...)` or `(define-module...)`?
      - xscott 4mo ago
        Heh, I'd probably take R4RS with define-syntax :-)
        rootnod3 4mo ago
        I mean, good choice, but you see the point, right? As much as ANSI CL has it's flaws, it has a standard, as much of a mixed bag it might be. Scheme is just a general potpourri of "we kinda have a guideline, but do whatever". I would very much prefer scheme if the different implementations had a working standard. But I can't take my Chez-scheme code and throw it into Guile-scheme. But pretty good chance I can take my ECL code and throw it into SBCL or LispWorks.
        xscott 4mo ago
        > you see the point, right? Bah, I think this debate was already old when I first saw people arguing it on comp.lang.lisp in the 90s. I don't have a dog in this fight other than to reject the notion that Common Lisp is "coherent" and not "organically grown". The original Scheme belongs in the category of languages like Standard ML and SmallTalk, where a small, careful, and talented group designed them with focus. Common Lisp seems like a bunch of smart people with competing interest and legacy baselines tried to meet in the middle. To the extent CL is more pragmatic, it's another example of "Worse is Better".
    - 4mo ago
  - rootnod3 4mo ago
    ANSI CL is such a breath of fresh air nowadays. Does what you need, doesn't get in your way, comes with batteries included. And conditions are just god-tier.
    - shakow 4mo ago
      > comes with batteries included I like CL, but I can't agree that a stdlib that doesn't even have a string split function is batteries-included.
      - nobleach 4mo ago
        And to bring it full-circle, this is the exact same thing I run into with Go. When I mention how nice it is that Lang X has feature Y, someone is quick to point out that either, "You can BUILD that in Go" or, "You don't really need feature Y". We've proven that we don't really NEED compilers either... but I would hate to have to do my job without them.
  - boxed 4mo ago
    I liked Objective-C (except the C parts). Such a breath of fresh air coming from C++ which was grown like a cancer with tons of features and you felt trapped by every one of them. Objective-C in contrast was a very few additions thoughtfully added that composed cleanly and freed the programmer to actually get things done.
  - iosjunkie 4mo ago
    "properly designed" - ah yes, programming languages are famous for universally agreed upon design philosophies.
  - fhn 4mo ago
    so make your own and let's see how you do
    - rootnod3 4mo ago
      Have you?
    - chlorion 4mo ago
      I am actually working on my own language, and getting something better than Go is actually not that difficult! The hard part about making a language is creating the stdlib and tooling and support for the language, but actually creating a language itself that has more features and better features than go can be done by a single person in a few months or a year probably, depending on how much experience they have. Generics specifically are a great example here. A single person can implement a language with go-level generics fairly easily.
      - ratrace 4mo ago
        [dead]
  - pizza234 4mo ago
    It isn't realistic to expect a design to be "proper in first place" because requirements change; my opinion is indeed the opposite - I find it natural for programming languages to have a (sort of) lifespan, and for new ones to (sort of) take their place.
    - someone_19 4mo ago
      Indeed, in 2012, it was not clear to anyone that generics were needed /s
    - array_key_first 4mo ago
      Sure but literally everyone and their mom said these features were needed and then Go team said "nuh uh!!!" But, as it turns out, they are needed because they solve real problems, and are not just fake complexity like some people strawman. Hopefully next they can add some error handling syntax and controls.
  - skywhopper 4mo ago
    You may be tired of languages evolving over time, but there is no other way to build a rich and useful language.
- tux3 4mo ago
  I don't think anyone admitted any wrong or had any big change in philosophy. It's always a good thing to learn something along the way. But the current message seems to be that this was the plan all along, and it just took some time to design properly. Of course adding generics is not something that every language needs to do. Scripting languages like Ruby don't really need this style of generics. It doesn't fit the design of the language, and it's not even clear what that would look like in Ruby. But static typing with generics does solve a recurring problem, and we've seen some real convergence towards type hints and type systems even in staunchly dynamic scripting languages. Modern Javascript is now mostly Typescript, and they've successfully retrofitted a very advanced type system in the last place I would have expected 20 years ago.
  - galangalalgol 4mo ago
    Type hinting seems like the worst of both. You pay the cost on refactor to go change them all, where dynamic typing or static type inference avoid that. You also don't have any of the benefits of static or dynamic typing. My strong preference is static typing with good inference and an ide that shows the inferred types everywhere when asked. Dynamic typing can make some tasks dramatically easier, I'm just not capable of using them without making hideous mistakes.
- maccard 4mo ago
  There’s a fine line between being willing to change your mind and getting the basics wrong. Go has repeatedly gotten the basics wrong.
  - Jleagle 4mo ago
    Sounds like you want this feature, and you just got it. Not sure how that's wrong. You don't add in every feature from the start.
    - maccard 4mo ago
      I wanted it 10 years ago.
  - whoiskevin 4mo ago
    Declaring a highly successful language as having the basics wrong means that you are not correct about the basics that were needed.
    - 9rx 4mo ago
      An engineer, of course, understands that there is no such thing as "wrong", only different tradeoffs, but with the rise of "vibe coding" you don't need to be an engineer to play in the world of programming anymore.
    - jeswin 4mo ago
      It's a highly successful language because (1) it was backed by Google, and (2) created by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. If it came out of anywhere else, it might have struggled even to hit the homepage here.
      - amazingamazing 4mo ago
        This logic is easily shown to not hold. Why isn't Carbon, Dart, etc. not really popular then?
- layer8 4mo ago
  It’s still annoying ~20 years after Java did the same mistake of not including generics, which was already clear to many people with C++ experience back then.
  - someone_19 4mo ago
    ...and Java didn't even have basic enums or sum types from the beginning. But it had null. They added enums, they added sealed classes. They're trying to get rid of null (apparently it's really hard). The problem is that in 2012, when go 1.0 was released, this should have been obvious to everyone. Here's a famous discussion from 2009, three years before the 1.0 release (tldr: facepalm) https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/rvGTZSFU8sY https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/rvGTZSFU8sY
    - layer8 4mo ago
      I remember back in 1995 thinking that it was stupid for Java not to have generics, so instead you had to always cast Vector/Hashtable elements from Object, or implement your own type-specific container classes for every element type (and there wasn’t even a preprocessor to facilitate the latter). Sum types I didn’t really miss, because you can implement a type-safe equivalent using the Visitor pattern, and retain an interface-implementation separation that native sum types typically don’t provide.
    - symaxian 4mo ago
      That is an interesting read, seems some were having a hard time grasping the benefit of having compiler checks for potential null dereferences. Having worked with null safety in TypeScript and Kotlin the extra bit of strictness is nice.
    - pjmlp 4mo ago
      The biggest design issue with adding value types and non nullable to Java, is that the number one design requirement of any solution is not to break Maven Central. Every compiled JAR out there has to keep working as always on a JVM with updated semantics, and worse code has to be compatible, when passing class instances around between old and new code. Then there are the guest languages on the JVM as well.
- ivanjermakov 4mo ago
  Worst thing a programming language can do is introduce core semantics changes after 1.0. See Python 2 -> 3 and Zig's *gates.
  - metaltyphoon 4mo ago
    Except Zig is not 1.0
    - ivanjermakov 4mo ago
      Of course, just a good case study of how radical languge changes are received by users.
9rx 4mo ago
Of course, if you go back and watch the original Go announcement it said that it would need generics once they figured out how to do it. And when the first version of generics landed it was said that generic methods would be added later, once they figured out how to do it. So that isn't applicable here. The need was always recognized.
- zarzavat 4mo ago
  If Go had just taken an off-the-shelf implementation of generics in 2009 then they could have spent the last 16 years deliberating over something useful, rather than attempting to reinvent programming language theory. The impression I have always gotten from Go's designers is that they are rather arrogant and averse to the idea of using other people's work. They want to develop everything from first principles, but by so doing end up with poor reinventions of well-studied concepts.
  - 9rx 4mo ago
    > and averse to the idea of using other people's work. They did use someone else's work, though. If you recall, Philip Wadler (of Haskell fame) designed Go's generics. > but by so doing end up with poor reinventions of well-studied concepts. Which is funny as there is probably nobody on earth that would be more capable than Wadler to get the job done. His pedigree in that area of work is pretty astounding. If he couldn't do more than create a poor reinvention, what hope did the laymen working on the Go core team have? Answer: They had no hope. It's not like they weren't trying. Ian Lance Taylor, for instance, is well known for beginning work on generics in Go before it was even first released to the public. He, among others, quite simply, were unable to figure it out. Everything looks easy and straightforward when observed comfortably from an armchair, I suppose.
    - pjmlp 4mo ago
      Yes, the same guy that supported the effort to add generics to Java, a decade beforee Go came to be, talk about not getting language design history. Stop excusing them, they were the first to acknolowdge being wrong in first place, "They are likely the two most difficult parts of any design for parametric polymorphism. In retrospect, we were biased too much by experience with C++ without concepts and Java generics. We would have been well-served to spend more time with CLU and C++ concepts earlier." -- https://go.googlesource.com/proposal/+/master/design/go2draft-generics-overview.md https://go.googlesource.com/proposal/+/master/design/go2draf...
CamouflagedKiwi 4mo ago
They didn't say they never wanted to do generics, but that they did want to take their time and do them right. Debatable how much they have been "right", although this gets them somewhat closer. And I think they have not been "wrong" in the ways they wanted to avoid (they referenced some issues with Java generics as prior art, although I forget the details).
- tines 4mo ago
  From another commenter here: > The post quotes the Go FAQ as saying, "we do not anticipate that Go will ever add generic methods".
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - skywhopper 4mo ago
    Is anyone actually mad about this, or do people just bring it up to stir the pot? Who cares what the FAQ says? They've worked out a way to add it easily in a backwards compatible way that can solve some problems. They had not identified this solution at the time they wrote the FAQ, and Go has been perfectly usable without this feature for 16 years.
    - stouset 4mo ago
      We care that time and time again, when anyone ever brings up a criticism of the language, they’re told that everything is just fine and it’s not a problem and we just don’t get the Go Philosophy. There’s not a problem, stop trying to make Go like every other language, and changing things would make the language more complicated and worse. Then when the language is inevitably changed for the better, resolving the complaint, suddenly it was always going to happen and it was just a matter of getting the details right. Every other language community I can think of is more than willing to acknowledge the shortcomings of their language. “Yeah, this kind of sucks in principle but it’s not something that gets in the way in practice” is a fine perspective. So is “this was a tradeoff; we went in this direction and these are the resulting downsides”. But the golang community practically trips over themselves to constantly argue that obvious shortcomings in the language are actually a good thing and we just don’t get it. Nobody is saying the language shouldn’t improve. We’ve all been begging the language to improve. But we’re also tired of the constant, obvious, and shameless gaslighting from the community whenever things do get better. You aren’t going to like the comparison, but it’s extremely Trumpian.
Cthulhu_ 4mo ago
Where did "they" say "we" didn't need generics? That sounds like a bad faith / misinterpretation / straw man; as someone else pointed out, they postponed generics until they figured out the use cases and whatnot. Remember that the generics implementations in other languages (like Java) take up half the spec + implementation - that's not something that Go wanted.
- tines 4mo ago
  From another commenter here: > The post quotes the Go FAQ as saying, "we do not anticipate that Go will ever add generic methods".
  - entrope 4mo ago
    You keep posting that. Do you understand the difference between that and "we anticipate that Go will never add generic methods"? What they actually said shows epistemic humility and recognizes that they might change their mind.
    - tines 4mo ago
      Hi! I'm a human being that is trying to understand the world and make friends along the way. I see you are too! Pleased to meet you. You asked the question > Where did "they" say "we" didn't need generics? And I (re)posted a quote from them, which sounds to me like, at the time, they believed that "we" Go users didn't need generics. They may have changed their mind, which is totally fine! But I do think it sounds like the person you were replying to wasn't commenting in bad faith or misunderstanding or fighting a straw man as you posted. Seems like a reasonable interpretation of what the Go devs had said at one point. To each his own though!
      - ncruces 4mo ago
        Do you understand the difference between generics and generic methods? We already had generics when they wrote "we don't anticipate adding generic methods."
fhn 4mo ago
complaining about things given to you for free
- doodpants 4mo ago
  I frankly don't buy into this trope that a lack of monetary cost should shield something from criticism. Anything created by humans for other humans, especially tools meant for getting work done, should certainly be open to evaluation/judgement/critcism, regardless of whether the creator chooses to charge for it. And it's not like Golang is some freshman student's hobby project; it was created by one of the world's largest tech companies, by people with a strong pedigree in programming language design.
zarzavat 4mo ago
Watching Go's development is like reliving the development of Java (which also didn't have generics at first), but over decades instead of years. Cannot wait for Go to implement an error handling system in the 2030s.
- 20k 4mo ago
  Its very funny watching certain segments of the programming industry rediscovering incredibly basic programming principles, after railing against them for so long. The AI people are starting to try and create formal specs to force the AI to generate an exact output, which is absolutely hilarious to me Dynamically typed/untyped languages finding that strict and visible typing is actually good is another
  - jimbokun 4mo ago
    I feel like there was a name for formal specs that produce an exact output, but it escapes me…
  - pjmlp 4mo ago
    Another one, WebAssembly people recreating application servers, and networking object models.
- pjmlp 4mo ago
  Thankfully we already have Java, so using Go is really for the scenarios where it cannot be avoided.
  - Mawr 4mo ago
    Thankfully some of us have taste.
    - za3faran 4mo ago
      Which is why we use platforms and languages that offer superior GCs, optimization, speed, and observability, like the JVM and Java.
jimbokun 4mo ago
Because they refuse to do something until they figure out how to do it well. I respect that.
- tapirl 4mo ago
  Go's generics design is the most clunky one among popular languages.
  - matthewmc3 4mo ago
    Exactly. We heard for years they wouldn't do generics it until they could do it right, and that was perfectly fine with me. Who wouldn't want a well thought out implementation? Then they released generics and it was like, "this is what you thought was the right way to do it?!"
  - jimbokun 4mo ago
    What’s the approach they should have used instead and how would it be better? Especially in terms of keeping fast compile times and overall performance.
    - tapirl 4mo ago
      [dead]
MrBuddyCasino 4mo ago
What did they say about proper enums.
- someone_19 4mo ago
  You already have iota. Type safety is not needed by design: > Go intentionally has a weak type system... Go in general encourages programming by writing code rather than programming by writing types... https://github.com/golang/go/issues/29649#issuecomment-454820179 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/29649#issuecomment-45482...
  - MrBuddyCasino 4mo ago
    Theres a whole universe between proper enums and go becoming Ada. Same with null safety.
    - someone_19 4mo ago
      Ada is the lost knowledge of a past, more advanced civilization.
      - pjmlp 4mo ago
        Thankfully not everyone has forgotten. https://www.adacore.com/case-studies/nvidia-adoption-of-spark-new-era-in-security-critical-software-development https://www.adacore.com/case-studies/nvidia-adoption-of-spar...

slowly implementing all the things they said we didn't need

by h1fra 4mo ago

slowly implementing all the things they said we didn't need

TheChaplain 4mo ago

It's not a bad thing to realize that one can be wrong and then strive for change.

a-french-anon 4mo ago
Maybe, but personally I've become quite tired of programming languages "organically grown" as opposed to properly designed the first time. After a good decade of C then C++, I found ANSI CL (despite being a massive compromise and unfinished) much more coherent and complete than both.
- ramon156 4mo ago
  So which language had it right from the start? is there a language that has a very low rewrite status?
  - bbkane 4mo ago
    I'd particularly like examples of statically typed languages that "got it right" (since I love me my types)
    - galangalalgol 4mo ago
      Ocaml maybe? Multi threading didn't seem necessary and introduced the possibility of data races.
  - maccard 4mo ago
    That’s whataboutism - no language is perfect, but given when go released it’s fair to hold them to a higher standard than languages what were designed 25 years earlier. As an aside - D, Zig, Rust, even typescript got most of the lessons learned from C right
    - blanched 4mo ago
      I'm not familiar with D, but Zig and Rust are well-known for continuously evolving. Zig has the (in)famous "Writergate": https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/24329 https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/24329 And besides Rust's high count of RFCs, there are things like async (I'm not complaining about it, but its an obvious large-scale "change"), module system changes, etc. (To be clear, I like both languages a lot. But I wouldn't call them slow moving or right from the start.)
    - Maxatar 4mo ago
      D literally can't even maintain backwards compatibility between minor version updates not to mention a big part of the D community left when D reinvented itself with D2. Among languages it's probably the one that is constantly in a state of flux.
      - Kapendev 4mo ago
        Really? Wow, this is like Zig and I love Zig!
      - sunsetSamurai 4mo ago
        what's a big project built with D? I feel it gets mentioned a lot on hackernews but I've never run into any project using it in the wild.
        Kapendev 4mo ago
        Flutter
      - sieabahlpark 4mo ago
        [dead]
  - poncho_romero 4mo ago
    I think Elixir is a good candidate here. It's small, coherent, and composes well, and (at least to my understanding) the authors consider the language finished, with no new major features planned.
    - sunsetSamurai 4mo ago
      Elixir is missing static types though, it's hard to go back to work on dynamic languages.
      - shakow 4mo ago
        Hopefully, it's coming. https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2023/06/22/type-system-updates-research-dev/ https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2023/06/22/type-system-updates-...
- ndr 4mo ago
  "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." -- Greenspun's tenth rule He had some lack of conviction to scope it so narrowly.
- bbkane 4mo ago
  I know Go is justly criticized for many of its design decisions, but it still feels well-designed and "small" to me in day to day usage when many other languages don't.
  - a-french-anon 4mo ago
    Eh, the thing with generics coming late is pretty much what I meant by "organically grown". My best litmus test these days is support for multidimensional arrays because it's always needed at some point in general purpose languages. CL and Ada had it right from the start while C++ needed C++23/26 to get std::mdspan and we still need to wrap it to pass the underlying/owned memory pool around (https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Multi-dimensional_array https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Multi-dimensional_array for more).
    - nish__ 4mo ago
      Doesn't every language support multidimensional arrays? It's just an array of arrays, no? What am I missing?
      - School-Cotton 4mo ago
        An array of arrays is an extremely inefficient and error-prone way to represent multidimensional arrays. If I want a 1000x1000 array, representing it physically as a single 1000000-element array requires one allocation, and processing it element-by-element (assuming it's stored in the same order we're iterating over it) is sequential in memory and therefore very efficient. Representing it as 1000 separate 1000-element arrays requires 1000 allocations, and pointer-chasing every time we move from one row to the next.
        nish__ 4mo ago
        I see. That makes sense.
        j_w 4mo ago
        Isn't an array of arrays by definition the sequential implementation? Otherwise you would have an array of pointers to arrays. The usage (syntax) for them would be the same but the performance would not be. They also have different uses. You would expect an array of arrays to be an array of arrays which share the same length. For an array of pointers to an array you would expect dynamic length arrays contained within the original array. Even in c++ could you not just define some int [1000][1000]foo? I've never really used C++ but my C knowledge assumption is that is 1000000 continuous elements.
- xscott 4mo ago
  Scheme is (or at least was) coherent. You don't need to look any further than set/setf/setq to see that Common Lisp is "organically grown" from the fertilizer of a committee. CL does its best to make every other lisp more attractive.
  - rootnod3 4mo ago
    Which Scheme are we talking about? R5RS? R7RS-small? R6RS? With SRFIs? Without? Which scheme? Is it `(library...)` or `(define-module...)`?
    - xscott 4mo ago
      Heh, I'd probably take R4RS with define-syntax :-)
      - rootnod3 4mo ago
        I mean, good choice, but you see the point, right? As much as ANSI CL has it's flaws, it has a standard, as much of a mixed bag it might be. Scheme is just a general potpourri of "we kinda have a guideline, but do whatever". I would very much prefer scheme if the different implementations had a working standard. But I can't take my Chez-scheme code and throw it into Guile-scheme. But pretty good chance I can take my ECL code and throw it into SBCL or LispWorks.
        xscott 4mo ago
        > you see the point, right? Bah, I think this debate was already old when I first saw people arguing it on comp.lang.lisp in the 90s. I don't have a dog in this fight other than to reject the notion that Common Lisp is "coherent" and not "organically grown". The original Scheme belongs in the category of languages like Standard ML and SmallTalk, where a small, careful, and talented group designed them with focus. Common Lisp seems like a bunch of smart people with competing interest and legacy baselines tried to meet in the middle. To the extent CL is more pragmatic, it's another example of "Worse is Better".
  - 4mo ago
- rootnod3 4mo ago
  ANSI CL is such a breath of fresh air nowadays. Does what you need, doesn't get in your way, comes with batteries included. And conditions are just god-tier.
  - shakow 4mo ago
    > comes with batteries included I like CL, but I can't agree that a stdlib that doesn't even have a string split function is batteries-included.
    - nobleach 4mo ago
      And to bring it full-circle, this is the exact same thing I run into with Go. When I mention how nice it is that Lang X has feature Y, someone is quick to point out that either, "You can BUILD that in Go" or, "You don't really need feature Y". We've proven that we don't really NEED compilers either... but I would hate to have to do my job without them.
- boxed 4mo ago
  I liked Objective-C (except the C parts). Such a breath of fresh air coming from C++ which was grown like a cancer with tons of features and you felt trapped by every one of them. Objective-C in contrast was a very few additions thoughtfully added that composed cleanly and freed the programmer to actually get things done.
- iosjunkie 4mo ago
  "properly designed" - ah yes, programming languages are famous for universally agreed upon design philosophies.
- fhn 4mo ago
  so make your own and let's see how you do
  - rootnod3 4mo ago
    Have you?
  - chlorion 4mo ago
    I am actually working on my own language, and getting something better than Go is actually not that difficult! The hard part about making a language is creating the stdlib and tooling and support for the language, but actually creating a language itself that has more features and better features than go can be done by a single person in a few months or a year probably, depending on how much experience they have. Generics specifically are a great example here. A single person can implement a language with go-level generics fairly easily.
    - ratrace 4mo ago
      [dead]
- pizza234 4mo ago
  It isn't realistic to expect a design to be "proper in first place" because requirements change; my opinion is indeed the opposite - I find it natural for programming languages to have a (sort of) lifespan, and for new ones to (sort of) take their place.
  - someone_19 4mo ago
    Indeed, in 2012, it was not clear to anyone that generics were needed /s
  - array_key_first 4mo ago
    Sure but literally everyone and their mom said these features were needed and then Go team said "nuh uh!!!" But, as it turns out, they are needed because they solve real problems, and are not just fake complexity like some people strawman. Hopefully next they can add some error handling syntax and controls.
- skywhopper 4mo ago
  You may be tired of languages evolving over time, but there is no other way to build a rich and useful language.
tux3 4mo ago
I don't think anyone admitted any wrong or had any big change in philosophy. It's always a good thing to learn something along the way. But the current message seems to be that this was the plan all along, and it just took some time to design properly. Of course adding generics is not something that every language needs to do. Scripting languages like Ruby don't really need this style of generics. It doesn't fit the design of the language, and it's not even clear what that would look like in Ruby. But static typing with generics does solve a recurring problem, and we've seen some real convergence towards type hints and type systems even in staunchly dynamic scripting languages. Modern Javascript is now mostly Typescript, and they've successfully retrofitted a very advanced type system in the last place I would have expected 20 years ago.
- galangalalgol 4mo ago
  Type hinting seems like the worst of both. You pay the cost on refactor to go change them all, where dynamic typing or static type inference avoid that. You also don't have any of the benefits of static or dynamic typing. My strong preference is static typing with good inference and an ide that shows the inferred types everywhere when asked. Dynamic typing can make some tasks dramatically easier, I'm just not capable of using them without making hideous mistakes.
maccard 4mo ago
There’s a fine line between being willing to change your mind and getting the basics wrong. Go has repeatedly gotten the basics wrong.
- Jleagle 4mo ago
  Sounds like you want this feature, and you just got it. Not sure how that's wrong. You don't add in every feature from the start.
  - maccard 4mo ago
    I wanted it 10 years ago.
- whoiskevin 4mo ago
  Declaring a highly successful language as having the basics wrong means that you are not correct about the basics that were needed.
  - 9rx 4mo ago
    An engineer, of course, understands that there is no such thing as "wrong", only different tradeoffs, but with the rise of "vibe coding" you don't need to be an engineer to play in the world of programming anymore.
  - jeswin 4mo ago
    It's a highly successful language because (1) it was backed by Google, and (2) created by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. If it came out of anywhere else, it might have struggled even to hit the homepage here.
    - amazingamazing 4mo ago
      This logic is easily shown to not hold. Why isn't Carbon, Dart, etc. not really popular then?
layer8 4mo ago
It’s still annoying ~20 years after Java did the same mistake of not including generics, which was already clear to many people with C++ experience back then.
- someone_19 4mo ago
  ...and Java didn't even have basic enums or sum types from the beginning. But it had null. They added enums, they added sealed classes. They're trying to get rid of null (apparently it's really hard). The problem is that in 2012, when go 1.0 was released, this should have been obvious to everyone. Here's a famous discussion from 2009, three years before the 1.0 release (tldr: facepalm) https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/rvGTZSFU8sY https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/rvGTZSFU8sY
  - layer8 4mo ago
    I remember back in 1995 thinking that it was stupid for Java not to have generics, so instead you had to always cast Vector/Hashtable elements from Object, or implement your own type-specific container classes for every element type (and there wasn’t even a preprocessor to facilitate the latter). Sum types I didn’t really miss, because you can implement a type-safe equivalent using the Visitor pattern, and retain an interface-implementation separation that native sum types typically don’t provide.
  - symaxian 4mo ago
    That is an interesting read, seems some were having a hard time grasping the benefit of having compiler checks for potential null dereferences. Having worked with null safety in TypeScript and Kotlin the extra bit of strictness is nice.
  - pjmlp 4mo ago
    The biggest design issue with adding value types and non nullable to Java, is that the number one design requirement of any solution is not to break Maven Central. Every compiled JAR out there has to keep working as always on a JVM with updated semantics, and worse code has to be compatible, when passing class instances around between old and new code. Then there are the guest languages on the JVM as well.
ivanjermakov 4mo ago
Worst thing a programming language can do is introduce core semantics changes after 1.0. See Python 2 -> 3 and Zig's *gates.
- metaltyphoon 4mo ago
  Except Zig is not 1.0
  - ivanjermakov 4mo ago
    Of course, just a good case study of how radical languge changes are received by users.

9rx 4mo ago

Of course, if you go back and watch the original Go announcement it said that it would need generics once they figured out how to do it. And when the first version of generics landed it was said that generic methods would be added later, once they figured out how to do it. So that isn't applicable here. The need was always recognized.

zarzavat 4mo ago
If Go had just taken an off-the-shelf implementation of generics in 2009 then they could have spent the last 16 years deliberating over something useful, rather than attempting to reinvent programming language theory. The impression I have always gotten from Go's designers is that they are rather arrogant and averse to the idea of using other people's work. They want to develop everything from first principles, but by so doing end up with poor reinventions of well-studied concepts.
- 9rx 4mo ago
  > and averse to the idea of using other people's work. They did use someone else's work, though. If you recall, Philip Wadler (of Haskell fame) designed Go's generics. > but by so doing end up with poor reinventions of well-studied concepts. Which is funny as there is probably nobody on earth that would be more capable than Wadler to get the job done. His pedigree in that area of work is pretty astounding. If he couldn't do more than create a poor reinvention, what hope did the laymen working on the Go core team have? Answer: They had no hope. It's not like they weren't trying. Ian Lance Taylor, for instance, is well known for beginning work on generics in Go before it was even first released to the public. He, among others, quite simply, were unable to figure it out. Everything looks easy and straightforward when observed comfortably from an armchair, I suppose.
  - pjmlp 4mo ago
    Yes, the same guy that supported the effort to add generics to Java, a decade beforee Go came to be, talk about not getting language design history. Stop excusing them, they were the first to acknolowdge being wrong in first place, "They are likely the two most difficult parts of any design for parametric polymorphism. In retrospect, we were biased too much by experience with C++ without concepts and Java generics. We would have been well-served to spend more time with CLU and C++ concepts earlier." -- https://go.googlesource.com/proposal/+/master/design/go2draft-generics-overview.md https://go.googlesource.com/proposal/+/master/design/go2draf...

CamouflagedKiwi 4mo ago

They didn't say they never wanted to do generics, but that they did want to take their time and do them right. Debatable how much they have been "right", although this gets them somewhat closer. And I think they have not been "wrong" in the ways they wanted to avoid (they referenced some issues with Java generics as prior art, although I forget the details).

tines 4mo ago
From another commenter here: > The post quotes the Go FAQ as saying, "we do not anticipate that Go will ever add generic methods".
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- skywhopper 4mo ago
  Is anyone actually mad about this, or do people just bring it up to stir the pot? Who cares what the FAQ says? They've worked out a way to add it easily in a backwards compatible way that can solve some problems. They had not identified this solution at the time they wrote the FAQ, and Go has been perfectly usable without this feature for 16 years.
  - stouset 4mo ago
    We care that time and time again, when anyone ever brings up a criticism of the language, they’re told that everything is just fine and it’s not a problem and we just don’t get the Go Philosophy. There’s not a problem, stop trying to make Go like every other language, and changing things would make the language more complicated and worse. Then when the language is inevitably changed for the better, resolving the complaint, suddenly it was always going to happen and it was just a matter of getting the details right. Every other language community I can think of is more than willing to acknowledge the shortcomings of their language. “Yeah, this kind of sucks in principle but it’s not something that gets in the way in practice” is a fine perspective. So is “this was a tradeoff; we went in this direction and these are the resulting downsides”. But the golang community practically trips over themselves to constantly argue that obvious shortcomings in the language are actually a good thing and we just don’t get it. Nobody is saying the language shouldn’t improve. We’ve all been begging the language to improve. But we’re also tired of the constant, obvious, and shameless gaslighting from the community whenever things do get better. You aren’t going to like the comparison, but it’s extremely Trumpian.

Cthulhu_ 4mo ago

Where did "they" say "we" didn't need generics? That sounds like a bad faith / misinterpretation / straw man; as someone else pointed out, they postponed generics until they figured out the use cases and whatnot. Remember that the generics implementations in other languages (like Java) take up half the spec + implementation - that's not something that Go wanted.

tines 4mo ago
From another commenter here: > The post quotes the Go FAQ as saying, "we do not anticipate that Go will ever add generic methods".
- entrope 4mo ago
  You keep posting that. Do you understand the difference between that and "we anticipate that Go will never add generic methods"? What they actually said shows epistemic humility and recognizes that they might change their mind.
  - tines 4mo ago
    Hi! I'm a human being that is trying to understand the world and make friends along the way. I see you are too! Pleased to meet you. You asked the question > Where did "they" say "we" didn't need generics? And I (re)posted a quote from them, which sounds to me like, at the time, they believed that "we" Go users didn't need generics. They may have changed their mind, which is totally fine! But I do think it sounds like the person you were replying to wasn't commenting in bad faith or misunderstanding or fighting a straw man as you posted. Seems like a reasonable interpretation of what the Go devs had said at one point. To each his own though!
    - ncruces 4mo ago
      Do you understand the difference between generics and generic methods? We already had generics when they wrote "we don't anticipate adding generic methods."

fhn 4mo ago

complaining about things given to you for free

doodpants 4mo ago
I frankly don't buy into this trope that a lack of monetary cost should shield something from criticism. Anything created by humans for other humans, especially tools meant for getting work done, should certainly be open to evaluation/judgement/critcism, regardless of whether the creator chooses to charge for it. And it's not like Golang is some freshman student's hobby project; it was created by one of the world's largest tech companies, by people with a strong pedigree in programming language design.

zarzavat 4mo ago

Watching Go's development is like reliving the development of Java (which also didn't have generics at first), but over decades instead of years. Cannot wait for Go to implement an error handling system in the 2030s.

20k 4mo ago
Its very funny watching certain segments of the programming industry rediscovering incredibly basic programming principles, after railing against them for so long. The AI people are starting to try and create formal specs to force the AI to generate an exact output, which is absolutely hilarious to me Dynamically typed/untyped languages finding that strict and visible typing is actually good is another
- jimbokun 4mo ago
  I feel like there was a name for formal specs that produce an exact output, but it escapes me…
- pjmlp 4mo ago
  Another one, WebAssembly people recreating application servers, and networking object models.
pjmlp 4mo ago
Thankfully we already have Java, so using Go is really for the scenarios where it cannot be avoided.
- Mawr 4mo ago
  Thankfully some of us have taste.
  - za3faran 4mo ago
    Which is why we use platforms and languages that offer superior GCs, optimization, speed, and observability, like the JVM and Java.

jimbokun 4mo ago

Because they refuse to do something until they figure out how to do it well. I respect that.

tapirl 4mo ago
Go's generics design is the most clunky one among popular languages.
- matthewmc3 4mo ago
  Exactly. We heard for years they wouldn't do generics it until they could do it right, and that was perfectly fine with me. Who wouldn't want a well thought out implementation? Then they released generics and it was like, "this is what you thought was the right way to do it?!"
- jimbokun 4mo ago
  What’s the approach they should have used instead and how would it be better? Especially in terms of keeping fast compile times and overall performance.
  - tapirl 4mo ago
    [dead]

MrBuddyCasino 4mo ago

What did they say about proper enums.

someone_19 4mo ago
You already have iota. Type safety is not needed by design: > Go intentionally has a weak type system... Go in general encourages programming by writing code rather than programming by writing types... https://github.com/golang/go/issues/29649#issuecomment-454820179 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/29649#issuecomment-45482...
- MrBuddyCasino 4mo ago
  Theres a whole universe between proper enums and go becoming Ada. Same with null safety.
  - someone_19 4mo ago
    Ada is the lost knowledge of a past, more advanced civilization.
    - pjmlp 4mo ago
      Thankfully not everyone has forgotten. https://www.adacore.com/case-studies/nvidia-adoption-of-spark-new-era-in-security-critical-software-development https://www.adacore.com/case-studies/nvidia-adoption-of-spar...