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I have never used Go or Clojure, but this is the first time I have heard of Go as being verbose - or is that just in comparison to Clojure?

• pcwalton 13y ago
  Depends on what you compare it to. Go doesn't have macros and idiomatically prefers C-style for loops to higher-level abstractions (except for the built-in "range" construct) for iteration. So in general Lisps like Clojure offer more opportunities for terse code. (Which style is easier to understand is of course a never-ending debate.)
• danenania 13y ago
  It's a bit more verbose than popular dynamic languages like ruby, python, clojure, etc. but a lot less verbose than Java, C#, or C. To me it feels roughly on par with javascript LOC-wise, though it has much stronger constructs.
• chongli 13y ago
  Clojure, being a Lisp, is as terse as you want it to be. Some of the examples on this page could be made even shorter with macros.
• tptacek 13y ago
  Golang is verbose, as modern languages go. In its idiom, it's actually a little more verbose than some modern, tight C (though less verbose than most C code, and much tighter than Java).
• NateDad 13y ago
  terseness is not a feature Go is striving for. That being said, it's still more terse than most other statically typed languages, simply due to type inference. You do have to write out some loops that other languages provide syntactic sugar for... people from those languages call that verbosity. Gophers call it clarity :)
  • cgag 13y ago
    Well, it's not so much syntactic sugar as having the power to abstract them away via generic functions like map, which I'd argue are both more clear and less error prone.
    • pjmlp 13y ago
      > power to abstract them away via generic functions It will take a while for that in Go, if ever.
• JulianMorrison 13y ago
  It's the difference between "programmable programming languages" (which the lisps are, as are haskell and ruby) versus "languages for programming in" (exemplified by go and java). Go code is very terse compared to the general run of "languages for programming in". And if you know the language, you can just read it. On the other hand, you've got some serious digging to do if you want to understand a clojure macro. Metaprogramming like that is seriously brain twisty.
  • gruseom 13y ago
    On the other hand, you've got some serious digging to do if you want to understand a clojure macro. Metaprogramming like that is seriously brain twisty I wish this meme would stop. Your "if you know the language, you can just read it" applies just as much here as it does there.
    • rsanders 13y ago
      I think you can be pretty proficient in writing regular Clojure and still find macros "twisty". Most Clojurians would agree that "The first rule of Macro Club is Dont Write Macros".
      • gruseom 13y ago
        Well, I wish that meme would stop too. It makes macros sound all freakazoid, when really they're just another technique. The obvious and natural and historically standard guidance is "Don't write a macro when a function will do."
    • mheiler 13y ago
      The concrete example is a perfect use case for a macro: In other languages you have to understand and change the compiler implementation to achieve the same effect. That's most likely more work.
  • tome 13y ago
    Another interpretation is that you can read "programmable programming languages" at the level of the problem domain, rather than at the level of the base language. (Assuming the problem domain is encoded sufficiently decently in a DSL).
• voidlogic 13y ago
  One man's verbosity is another man's clear and maintainable code.
  • chongli 13y ago
    That does not follow. The more verbose code is, the more prone to error and less maintainable it is. Verbosity is never valued in prose; it's superfluous, pedantic and boring. Why should code be any different?
    • grey-area 13y ago
      Verbosity is never valued in prose Perhaps you don't value verbosity, but fans of Flaubert, Balzac, Henry James, Joyce, Poe, Dostoyevsky and Dickens would disagree with you. Your absolute statement is false when looking at most of the valued literature over the last few hundred years. The more verbose code is, the more prone to error and less maintainable it is. I think this is true, but only to a certain point. Past that point the code becomes more difficult to understand and less difficult to maintain (for example all variables with one-letter names, few new lines). So there's a continuum there between terse impenetrable languages, and verbose impenetrable languages on either extreme, and you disagree with the OP about where on that continuum Go falls. It's all a matter of opinion and frankly is more subjective than objective and depends on things like the standard library and culture of the language far more than the syntax. There are also many other factors in being maintainable and error prone - verbosity is only one of them. So saying that Go is more verbose than language X doesn't really tell us much about how prone to error or maintainable Go is compared to language X on its own. For what it's worth, I find it comparable to languages like C, Ruby or Python in terms of verbosity, which feels about the right place to stop being terse to me. YMMV.
      • chongli 13y ago
        >Perhaps you don't value verbosity, but fans of Flaubert, Balzac, Henry James, Joyce, Poe, Dostoyevsky and Dickens would disagree with you. I don't value verbosity and I do appreciate the works of those authors: I do not consider them verbose. Verbosity is not a measure of the absolute length of a document; it's relative to a minimum expression of an idea. Per this definition, all verbosity is unnecessary because it conveys no additional information.
• mseepgood 13y ago
  No, it's "just right" for the human mind. It's not too verbose and not too concise.