5 ms·

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?
  - voidfunc 4mo ago
    Its just bitter dorks bitter their pet language with cutting edge programming abstractions didnt make it to the big leagues.
  - doodpants 4mo ago
    I can't speak about Dart, but Carbon had just barely started development when it was first announced 4 years ago, and is currently presented as an experimental language that is not yet ready for use [0]. 0: https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang#project-status https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang#project-statu...
  - no_wizard 4mo ago
    Dart was relegated to effectively being Flutter. It was originally intended to supersede JavaScript but no other engine would commit to that. It failed at its initial goal and hasn’t really found a footing outside of Flutter. Carbon is by its own admittance not ready to use and I think mostly relegated to solving Google’s problems with C++ right now. Both of them didn’t ship with a standard library as robust as Go’s. One thing that made Go popular out of the gate is it is extremely good fast to build out robust HTTP services and infrastructure. This is a very common use case and they tailored Go to be a great fit for it. You can build your entire backend without a single third party module if desired using Go’s standard library and it isn’t terribly complicated to do so.
maccard 4mo ago
Something can be highly succesful in spite of having glaring design flaws. Nobody is claiming go isn't wildly succesful, but it's _in spite_ of these issues. It was clear over a decade ago that iota, gopath, and lack of generics were massive kneecaps to the language; go changing it's mind on those things isn't progress it's just getting the fundamentals wrong. A good example of where they're kind of stuck is date formatting - it's stupid, unclear, and likely a mistake, but it's not a fundamental flaw; it's just a quirk.
- 9rx 4mo ago
  Why is iota a massive kneecap to the language? It is semantically identical to enum in C and Typescript. The trouble is that Rust is older than Go and it was already confusing people into thinking enums and sum types are the same thing, so by using slightly different syntax, iota, Go avoided the whole confusion of users thinking that enums would behave like sum types instead of actual enums. Is your attempt at making a point that not having sum types is the massive flaw? Sum types are a useful construct, to be sure, but there are plenty of good languages without them. That's more on the design quirk end, realistically.
  - jolux 4mo ago
    Rust is technically older than Go, but who was actually using it when Go 1.0 came out in 2012? Rust 1.0 wasn’t until 2015.
    - 9rx 4mo ago
      The social landscape doesn't depend on anyone actually using it. However, 1.0 isn't a significant milestone like you suggest either. For a current example, Zig is relatively popular today despite not yet reaching 1.0.
      - stouset 4mo ago
        Do you just forget the things you write in earlier comments? > Rust is older than Go and it was already confusing people into thinking enums and sum types are the same thing Of course the social landscape depends on people actually using it. None of the people who weren’t using Rust at the time were magically confused about enums and sum types by the mere existence of some new and experimental language. Rust barely existed at the time Go was first being developed. And given the history of Go and the notoriety of its core team for flatly ignoring prior work in programming languages, it’s extremely unlikely that Pike et al gave more than a cursory glance to what nascent Rust was doing at the time. But even if they had, to suggest that they intentionally replicated a dumb thing from C but gave it a different name to avoid users being confused by a different thing from a language that roughly nobody knew about at the time is bananas.
boxed 4mo ago
The basics of a programming language were wrong. The basics of marketing were very right. Those are not the same.
n6242 4mo ago
By that logic Windows would be the best operating system ever and perfect in every way, and anyone who disagrees must be wrong about how an OS should be.
- hocuspocus 4mo ago
  And Javascript and Python the best languages.
OtomotO 4mo ago
cough JavaScript cough
someone_19 4mo ago
So you mean to say that PHP5 and Js from 2007 had a well-founded design?
ivanjermakov 4mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
pjmlp 4mo ago
Yes, all great examples of language design. PHP, Java, JavaScript, C, C++, Go

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?
- voidfunc 4mo ago
  Its just bitter dorks bitter their pet language with cutting edge programming abstractions didnt make it to the big leagues.
- doodpants 4mo ago
  I can't speak about Dart, but Carbon had just barely started development when it was first announced 4 years ago, and is currently presented as an experimental language that is not yet ready for use [0]. 0: https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang#project-status https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang#project-statu...
- no_wizard 4mo ago
  Dart was relegated to effectively being Flutter. It was originally intended to supersede JavaScript but no other engine would commit to that. It failed at its initial goal and hasn’t really found a footing outside of Flutter. Carbon is by its own admittance not ready to use and I think mostly relegated to solving Google’s problems with C++ right now. Both of them didn’t ship with a standard library as robust as Go’s. One thing that made Go popular out of the gate is it is extremely good fast to build out robust HTTP services and infrastructure. This is a very common use case and they tailored Go to be a great fit for it. You can build your entire backend without a single third party module if desired using Go’s standard library and it isn’t terribly complicated to do so.

maccard 4mo ago

Something can be highly succesful in spite of having glaring design flaws. Nobody is claiming go isn't wildly succesful, but it's _in spite_ of these issues. It was clear over a decade ago that iota, gopath, and lack of generics were massive kneecaps to the language; go changing it's mind on those things isn't progress it's just getting the fundamentals wrong. A good example of where they're kind of stuck is date formatting - it's stupid, unclear, and likely a mistake, but it's not a fundamental flaw; it's just a quirk.

9rx 4mo ago
Why is iota a massive kneecap to the language? It is semantically identical to enum in C and Typescript. The trouble is that Rust is older than Go and it was already confusing people into thinking enums and sum types are the same thing, so by using slightly different syntax, iota, Go avoided the whole confusion of users thinking that enums would behave like sum types instead of actual enums. Is your attempt at making a point that not having sum types is the massive flaw? Sum types are a useful construct, to be sure, but there are plenty of good languages without them. That's more on the design quirk end, realistically.
- jolux 4mo ago
  Rust is technically older than Go, but who was actually using it when Go 1.0 came out in 2012? Rust 1.0 wasn’t until 2015.
  - 9rx 4mo ago
    The social landscape doesn't depend on anyone actually using it. However, 1.0 isn't a significant milestone like you suggest either. For a current example, Zig is relatively popular today despite not yet reaching 1.0.
    - stouset 4mo ago
      Do you just forget the things you write in earlier comments? > Rust is older than Go and it was already confusing people into thinking enums and sum types are the same thing Of course the social landscape depends on people actually using it. None of the people who weren’t using Rust at the time were magically confused about enums and sum types by the mere existence of some new and experimental language. Rust barely existed at the time Go was first being developed. And given the history of Go and the notoriety of its core team for flatly ignoring prior work in programming languages, it’s extremely unlikely that Pike et al gave more than a cursory glance to what nascent Rust was doing at the time. But even if they had, to suggest that they intentionally replicated a dumb thing from C but gave it a different name to avoid users being confused by a different thing from a language that roughly nobody knew about at the time is bananas.

boxed 4mo ago

The basics of a programming language were wrong. The basics of marketing were very right. Those are not the same.

n6242 4mo ago

By that logic Windows would be the best operating system ever and perfect in every way, and anyone who disagrees must be wrong about how an OS should be.

hocuspocus 4mo ago
And Javascript and Python the best languages.

OtomotO 4mo ago

cough JavaScript cough

someone_19 4mo ago

So you mean to say that PHP5 and Js from 2007 had a well-founded design?

ivanjermakov 4mo ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

pjmlp 4mo ago

Yes, all great examples of language design. PHP, Java, JavaScript, C, C++, Go