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Yes, Go is boring, but it's interesting that the people who hate on Go for being boring are not the same people who hate on Java for being boring (though Java 8

Yes, Go is boring, but it's interesting that the people who hate on Go for being boring are not the same people who hate on Java for being boring (though Java 8 is much improved).

chc 12y ago
People don't hate Java for being boring, per se. They hate it for being inflexible, verbose and having a bureaucratic culture.
- twic 12y ago
  People hate Java because it's unremarkable but successful. There's nothing particularly innovative or wild about it, but equally, nothing particularly awful (plenty of mediocre, of course). Whether despite or because of that, it somehow became the most widely-used language in places you get paid to sit and write code. It always feels cool to hate popular things, and it always feels cool to hate boring things. Hence, Java became the Nickelback of programming languages.
  - spoiler 12y ago
    I like some Nickelback songs. Also, I don't hate on Java, I've even gotten seriously into it for about two years (for a university project and later got a job based on that), and it just made me unhappy (which is a big deal for me, for unrelated reasons). However, I never felt unhappy coding in Ruby (love it!), C (even though it was/is frustrating sometimes), C++ (ok, I am relatively new to it), Python, JavaScript... I tried other languages like Haskell, Erlang and similar, that didn't stick (Erlang syntax will plague me with confusion forever, probably), but nine of them made me unhappy when I worked in them.
- krick 12y ago
  I don't really get what all you guys mean by "boring". I'd appreciate some clarification (especially about Go). What does it mean for language to be "fun"? I have some intuition of "fun", but it doesn't play well with what are you saying. I'd say being "fun" means ability to solve your problems easily, concentrating on problems themselves, not on language pitfalls. Isn't it? That's pretty much synonymous (maybe a little broader though) to "productive". So I can't comprehend how language can be "less fun, but more productive and maintainable".
  - chc 12y ago
    > I don't really get what all you guys mean by "boring". I'd appreciate some clarification (especially about Go). Go offers very little that's interesting or innovative and doesn't go out of its way to empower you in any particular way. It's fairly straightforward and tries to avoid gotchas, which is both good and bad. This means writing code is easy and you're unlikely to make a mess, but there are relatively few opportunities for making your code read better or to structure it better. In a nutshell: Writing code is more of a drudge than an art. For example, I was recently writing a processor for some data that came in an XML file format. I figured maybe throw it at Go since it was a lot of data and Go has pretty good XML support. In Go, this was a lot of looping and copying and basically nothing all that confusing but it just felt like busywork. For fun, I decided to write it in Clojure as well. The Clojure version was much more pleasant to read, with all the loops disappearing into simple compositions of map, reduce and filter. It felt nice to be able to easily express things in such an elegant way instead of on a more machine-like level. (To be clear, I am not a great Go programmer and wouldn't want to speak for the Go community, though this is something the language creators seem to agree with. I'm just trying to explain what how I understand this stuff.)
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      > Go offers very little that's interesting or innovative and doesn't go out of its way to empower you in any particular way. That's true of the features looked at individually. I think its particular combination of design choices is interesting and novel ("innovative" requires a value judgement that I am not quite ready to make in Go's case; though I think the momentum its gained in certain areas is quite likely because it does offer something that is innovative in its utility even if its not immediately apparent why the particular combination of features it provides should be.)
      - chc 12y ago
        My feeling is that it's mainly the CSP features and the relatively good speed that make Go stand out despite being "boring." Having such strong concurrency primitives baked into a generally performant language is really cool and makes it the obvious choice for doing large tasks quickly.

Yes, Go is boring, but it's interesting that the people who hate on Go for being boring are not the same people who hate on Java for being boring (though Java 8 is much improved).

chc 12y ago

People don't hate Java for being boring, per se. They hate it for being inflexible, verbose and having a bureaucratic culture.

twic 12y ago
People hate Java because it's unremarkable but successful. There's nothing particularly innovative or wild about it, but equally, nothing particularly awful (plenty of mediocre, of course). Whether despite or because of that, it somehow became the most widely-used language in places you get paid to sit and write code. It always feels cool to hate popular things, and it always feels cool to hate boring things. Hence, Java became the Nickelback of programming languages.
- spoiler 12y ago
  I like some Nickelback songs. Also, I don't hate on Java, I've even gotten seriously into it for about two years (for a university project and later got a job based on that), and it just made me unhappy (which is a big deal for me, for unrelated reasons). However, I never felt unhappy coding in Ruby (love it!), C (even though it was/is frustrating sometimes), C++ (ok, I am relatively new to it), Python, JavaScript... I tried other languages like Haskell, Erlang and similar, that didn't stick (Erlang syntax will plague me with confusion forever, probably), but nine of them made me unhappy when I worked in them.
krick 12y ago
I don't really get what all you guys mean by "boring". I'd appreciate some clarification (especially about Go). What does it mean for language to be "fun"? I have some intuition of "fun", but it doesn't play well with what are you saying. I'd say being "fun" means ability to solve your problems easily, concentrating on problems themselves, not on language pitfalls. Isn't it? That's pretty much synonymous (maybe a little broader though) to "productive". So I can't comprehend how language can be "less fun, but more productive and maintainable".
- chc 12y ago
  > I don't really get what all you guys mean by "boring". I'd appreciate some clarification (especially about Go). Go offers very little that's interesting or innovative and doesn't go out of its way to empower you in any particular way. It's fairly straightforward and tries to avoid gotchas, which is both good and bad. This means writing code is easy and you're unlikely to make a mess, but there are relatively few opportunities for making your code read better or to structure it better. In a nutshell: Writing code is more of a drudge than an art. For example, I was recently writing a processor for some data that came in an XML file format. I figured maybe throw it at Go since it was a lot of data and Go has pretty good XML support. In Go, this was a lot of looping and copying and basically nothing all that confusing but it just felt like busywork. For fun, I decided to write it in Clojure as well. The Clojure version was much more pleasant to read, with all the loops disappearing into simple compositions of map, reduce and filter. It felt nice to be able to easily express things in such an elegant way instead of on a more machine-like level. (To be clear, I am not a great Go programmer and wouldn't want to speak for the Go community, though this is something the language creators seem to agree with. I'm just trying to explain what how I understand this stuff.)
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > Go offers very little that's interesting or innovative and doesn't go out of its way to empower you in any particular way. That's true of the features looked at individually. I think its particular combination of design choices is interesting and novel ("innovative" requires a value judgement that I am not quite ready to make in Go's case; though I think the momentum its gained in certain areas is quite likely because it does offer something that is innovative in its utility even if its not immediately apparent why the particular combination of features it provides should be.)
    - chc 12y ago
      My feeling is that it's mainly the CSP features and the relatively good speed that make Go stand out despite being "boring." Having such strong concurrency primitives baked into a generally performant language is really cool and makes it the obvious choice for doing large tasks quickly.