5 ms·

I grew up with Pascal and its derivatives, so I have a strong sense of the aesthetic of programming languages. I can't take Go seriously, or bring myself to us

by etfb 14y ago

I grew up with Pascal and its derivatives, so I have a strong sense of the aesthetic of programming languages. I can't take Go seriously, or bring myself to use it, because it appears to have no aesthetic sense at all. It's ugly! Strings of keywords and punctuation, no rhythm to it, just a lot of mess. Like a cross between C and Prolog, perhaps, with a smattering of Python but only the ugly bits. I really don't like it. Now, if you want to see a recent language with a bit of style to it -- and bear in mind I know nothing of how it is to use in practice, so I'm basing my opinions entirely on the look of it -- I think Rust is one of the best of the pack. So much smoother. TL;DR (for any Redditors who may have stumbled in on their way to the Ron Paul fansite): languages have a flavour, and Go's flavour is "mess".

stefantalpalaru 14y ago
> I can't take Go seriously, or bring myself to use it But you can criticize its aesthetic nevertheless? Maybe if you could bring yourself to use it you might appreciate the elegance of the Communicating Sequential Processes implementation. Or maybe the clean OOP practices derived from using interfaces. Or the beauty of coroutines mapped unto multiple OS threads. tl;dr: learn it properly before complaining it's not like mom's cooking
- etfb 14y ago
  Sorry, but I don't feel like I need to be an expert in something before I can express an opinion about it. You're welcome to send a quick message to pg to get a refund on what you've paid to read my comment, if you disagree.
  - stefantalpalaru 14y ago
    Your informed opinions are more valuable to those "spending" the time to read them, so please make an effort and study the problem domain a little more before speaking on the subject.
laumars 14y ago
When choosing a language for a job, I'm often concerned about whether the source code is apathetically pleasing. After all, execution speed, portability, compile time, development time, usable toolkits and maintainability are all irrelevant if the source code isn't pretty enough to frame and hang on your living room wall. </sarcasm>
otikik 14y ago
I believe that the beauty of a tool relies purely on its usefulness. Your comment sounds to me like someone saying that Michellangelo's David is "ugly" because the sound it makes when hit by a hammer is not armonious.
lobster_johnson 14y ago
Sure, Go is ugly. I had the same reaction as you. But it's so damn functional. There are plenty of warts, syntax and design-wise, but once you get over them, it's actually a decent language. Compared to Erlang, for example, it's positively beautiful. I like Erlang's execution model, but the unnecessarily gnarly syntax and the antique approaches to some things (no real strings, no Unicode, tuples that depend on positional values instead of named attributes, horrible stack traces, tail-call recursion as a looping construct, etc.) has made me stay away. Go is a decent alternative to both C/C++ and Ruby for me these days. There are plenty of things I don't like about Go, but it's easy to forgive many of them when the language makes you so productive (at least for the things I need it for; it's pretty bad at web app development and completely useless for GUI development), so I do. Sometimes you just want something that works, with minimal amounts of pain. C++ works, but is always painful to me because it feels like the language is working against me, not with me. I love the simple syntax in Go; the no-nonsense approach to object-orientation, the way the typing system allows adding methods to arbitrary types, which may have been inspired by Haskell's typeclasses. I love having native Unicode strings, first-class functions, a simple package system, built-in concurrency and decent networking in the standard libs. I love the built-in documentation generator (although it's too simplistic at this point; why not Markdown?). Things I don't like: * Capitalized names for visibility. * nils in the language instead of Haskell-style Maybe. * nil cannot be used in place of false. * The "non-nil being nil" insanity (an interface value can be nil, but it can also be non-nil and contain a nil value). * Functions return errors instead of Haskell-style Either monads, or Erlang-style matching. (I see the problem with exceptions, but Go's solution is worse and leads to very awkward code that has to branch a lot to catch errors.) * The fact that "go" is a language keyword; compare with Rust's very elegant task spawning, which is part of the standard library rather than being built into the language, and yet relies on first-class language constructs to integrate perfectly. * That "range" is not extensible (that I know; it only works on maps, arrays, slices and channels). * The whole GOPATH thing, pretty much requiring that you maintain a local tree with symlinks. * That "import" when used with Git cannot be pinned to a specific revision (so if you rely on a third-party package, it could break your app at any time if HEAD changes; it's ridiculous, and counter-productive, to have to fork third-party repos just because of this). * That packages have only a single nesting level. I don't mean that I should be able to create a package "x.y.z", I mean that given a package "x", all the files have to be in the same folder. I can't organize the tree in multiple subfolders. * That statements are not expressions. * That semicolon elimination necessitates some insane syntax at places (like having to end a line with ","). * The lack of structural tagging in the language (similar to Python and Java annotations), and the fact that they did add tagging, but only for struct fields, and the tags can only be strings. Right now, Go is, in my opinion, mostly an inelegant, weirdly-shaped thing that fits into the weird hole not filled by C and C++, a stepping stone to the next big language. I don't love the language, but I love how I can do the same things I was planning to use C++ or Ruby for; as a C++ replacement I gain productivity and simplicity; as a Ruby replacement I gain performance. Go is, if anything, a very pragmatic compromise that favours simplicity over complexity at the expense of structural and syntactical elegance. It looks a lot like Java around 1.3-1.4, before the enterprise stuff derailed its focus. My concern is that Go has no particular philosophy as a foundation; it bakes in some current concerns (concurrency, networking, ease of use) and made itself a very useful hammer for hammering today's nails, but may not be as easy to extend to work with tomorrow's screws. PS. I, too, come from Pascal — specifically, Borland's Object Pascal. While I have fond memories of that language, I'm not sure elegance was one of its main traits.
im_dario 14y ago
As a polyglot developer, I found Go syntax just nice. It is not maybe so sweet as Ruby's syntax (which I like) but it just feels right. Rust makes me think on Haskell but it is not so far away from Go, IMHO. I just skimmed Rust tutorial so I'm probably missing something.

by etfb 14y ago

stefantalpalaru 14y ago

> I can't take Go seriously, or bring myself to use it But you can criticize its aesthetic nevertheless? Maybe if you could bring yourself to use it you might appreciate the elegance of the Communicating Sequential Processes implementation. Or maybe the clean OOP practices derived from using interfaces. Or the beauty of coroutines mapped unto multiple OS threads. tl;dr: learn it properly before complaining it's not like mom's cooking

etfb 14y ago
Sorry, but I don't feel like I need to be an expert in something before I can express an opinion about it. You're welcome to send a quick message to pg to get a refund on what you've paid to read my comment, if you disagree.
- stefantalpalaru 14y ago
  Your informed opinions are more valuable to those "spending" the time to read them, so please make an effort and study the problem domain a little more before speaking on the subject.

laumars 14y ago

When choosing a language for a job, I'm often concerned about whether the source code is apathetically pleasing. After all, execution speed, portability, compile time, development time, usable toolkits and maintainability are all irrelevant if the source code isn't pretty enough to frame and hang on your living room wall. </sarcasm>

otikik 14y ago

I believe that the beauty of a tool relies purely on its usefulness. Your comment sounds to me like someone saying that Michellangelo's David is "ugly" because the sound it makes when hit by a hammer is not armonious.

lobster_johnson 14y ago

Sure, Go is ugly. I had the same reaction as you. But it's so damn functional. There are plenty of warts, syntax and design-wise, but once you get over them, it's actually a decent language. Compared to Erlang, for example, it's positively beautiful. I like Erlang's execution model, but the unnecessarily gnarly syntax and the antique approaches to some things (no real strings, no Unicode, tuples that depend on positional values instead of named attributes, horrible stack traces, tail-call recursion as a looping construct, etc.) has made me stay away. Go is a decent alternative to both C/C++ and Ruby for me these days. There are plenty of things I don't like about Go, but it's easy to forgive many of them when the language makes you so productive (at least for the things I need it for; it's pretty bad at web app development and completely useless for GUI development), so I do. Sometimes you just want something that works, with minimal amounts of pain. C++ works, but is always painful to me because it feels like the language is working against me, not with me. I love the simple syntax in Go; the no-nonsense approach to object-orientation, the way the typing system allows adding methods to arbitrary types, which may have been inspired by Haskell's typeclasses. I love having native Unicode strings, first-class functions, a simple package system, built-in concurrency and decent networking in the standard libs. I love the built-in documentation generator (although it's too simplistic at this point; why not Markdown?). Things I don't like: * Capitalized names for visibility. * nils in the language instead of Haskell-style Maybe. * nil cannot be used in place of false. * The "non-nil being nil" insanity (an interface value can be nil, but it can also be non-nil and contain a nil value). * Functions return errors instead of Haskell-style Either monads, or Erlang-style matching. (I see the problem with exceptions, but Go's solution is worse and leads to very awkward code that has to branch a lot to catch errors.) * The fact that "go" is a language keyword; compare with Rust's very elegant task spawning, which is part of the standard library rather than being built into the language, and yet relies on first-class language constructs to integrate perfectly. * That "range" is not extensible (that I know; it only works on maps, arrays, slices and channels). * The whole GOPATH thing, pretty much requiring that you maintain a local tree with symlinks. * That "import" when used with Git cannot be pinned to a specific revision (so if you rely on a third-party package, it could break your app at any time if HEAD changes; it's ridiculous, and counter-productive, to have to fork third-party repos just because of this). * That packages have only a single nesting level. I don't mean that I should be able to create a package "x.y.z", I mean that given a package "x", all the files have to be in the same folder. I can't organize the tree in multiple subfolders. * That statements are not expressions. * That semicolon elimination necessitates some insane syntax at places (like having to end a line with ","). * The lack of structural tagging in the language (similar to Python and Java annotations), and the fact that they did add tagging, but only for struct fields, and the tags can only be strings. Right now, Go is, in my opinion, mostly an inelegant, weirdly-shaped thing that fits into the weird hole not filled by C and C++, a stepping stone to the next big language. I don't love the language, but I love how I can do the same things I was planning to use C++ or Ruby for; as a C++ replacement I gain productivity and simplicity; as a Ruby replacement I gain performance. Go is, if anything, a very pragmatic compromise that favours simplicity over complexity at the expense of structural and syntactical elegance. It looks a lot like Java around 1.3-1.4, before the enterprise stuff derailed its focus. My concern is that Go has no particular philosophy as a foundation; it bakes in some current concerns (concurrency, networking, ease of use) and made itself a very useful hammer for hammering today's nails, but may not be as easy to extend to work with tomorrow's screws. PS. I, too, come from Pascal — specifically, Borland's Object Pascal. While I have fond memories of that language, I'm not sure elegance was one of its main traits.

im_dario 14y ago

As a polyglot developer, I found Go syntax just nice. It is not maybe so sweet as Ruby's syntax (which I like) but it just feels right. Rust makes me think on Haskell but it is not so far away from Go, IMHO. I just skimmed Rust tutorial so I'm probably missing something.