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I think elegant is probably the wrong word. Practical is the one I would use. Go isn't Haskell; it isn't there to impress the PL guys. They boiled down the aver
by jzelinskie 13y ago
I think elegant is probably the wrong word. Practical is the one I would use. Go isn't Haskell; it isn't there to impress the PL guys. They boiled down the average imperative language and made many decisions for you so that opinions don't have to collide while working on a project. Because the decisions they made, they have very nice tooling to go along with the language.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 13y agoAs the project gets bigger the right word approaches "elegant" but practical does fit. It seems like a language for engineering software, big software like c++'s boost or google's bot. Unsurprisingly, bloggers aren't talking about that scale.
- chimeracoder 13y agoI agree completely. I like Lisp because it's elegant, and the solutions to difficult problems in Lisp are beautiful in every sense of the word. I like Go because it's practical. I can hammer out the solution to a difficult problem very quickly and that quick solution is reasonably scalable from a software engineering perspective[0]. Go makes it easy to write the first iteration, but its real strength comes from making it easy to write the subsequent n iterations. That's "elegance" of some sort, but it's elegance in engineering, not in programming, which is an important difference. You might say it's "elegantly practical" [0] By "scalable" I don't necessarily mean performance, but the costs of scaling developer manpower on large projects - ie, a "quick-and-dirty" solution in some languages may require expensive refactoring down the line, or cause you to design bad interfaces in your functions, etc.
- duaneb 13y agoI would go a step further and say it's not elegant so much as practical and simple. On large projects this can be confused for elegance.
- copergi 13y agoElegant is definitely the wrong word. Scheme is elegant. Go is simplistic. Not the same thing.
- letstryagain 13y agoSimplistic is a negative word, it means over simplified. You probably mean 'minimalistic'?
- copergi 13y agoNope, your definition of simplistic is precisely what I meant.
- courtf 13y agoI forget which blog review of Go I was reading, but the summary (paraphrased) has stuck with me: "I came to Go expecting the elegance of a ballerina, and was surprised to discover the grace of an experienced bar-room brawler."