I must say that whenever there is a discussion about the merits of the Go programming language, it really feels hostile in the discussion thread. It seems that people are seriously angry that others even consider using the language. It is sort of painful reading through the responses which implicitly declare that anybody who enjoys programming with Go is clueless.
It also really makes me wonder if I am living in some sort of alternate reality. I am a professional programmer working at a large company and I am pretty sure that 95% of my colleagues (myself included, as difficult as it is for me to admit) have no idea what a reified generic is. I have run into some problems where being able to define custom generic containers would be nice, but I don't feel like that has seriously hindered my ability to deliver safe, functional, and maintainable software.
What I appreciate most about Go is that I am sure that I can look at 99% of the Go code written in the world and I can understand it immediately. When maintaining large code bases with many developers of differing skill levels, this advantage can't be understated. That is the reason there are so many successful new programs popping up in Go with large open-source communities. It is because Go is accessible and friendly to people of varying skill levels, unlike most of the opinions expressed in this thread.
>What I appreciate most about Go is that I am sure that I can look at 99% of the Go code written in the world and I can understand it immediately.
No you really can't. You can look at any given line of code and tell me what it does, where as it might take more time to parse any given line of Haskell, Scala, or OCaml longer.
However, expressivity in a large application pays a dividend tenfold, because the main challenge of reading code is not any given line, it is understanding the application architecture, the frameworks, the data flow and how it all works together.
> That is the reason there are so many successful new programs popping up in Go with large open-source communities.
Successful, or popular? Just look at Docker. Certainly popular, but check the bug tracker or talk to anyone with real world experience using it at scale and you'll be hearing a completely different story.
I think the negative attitude comes more from frustration than from anything else.
> I am a professional programmer working at a large company and I am pretty sure that 95% of my colleagues (myself included, as difficult as it is for me to admit) have no idea what a reified generic is.
I didn't know what it was called either until I saw them mentioned here, but now that I know about it, I get why it would be useful. Before that, I kind of assumed all languages with generics would also allow you to access the type information at runtime.
> I have run into some problems where being able to define custom generic containers would be nice, but I don't feel like that has seriously hindered my ability to deliver safe, functional, and maintainable software.
Interesting read, and I admit there is some of that. But my point isn't to say that those features aren't useful or powerful, but rather that with the constraint of working with a large group of programmers of varying skills, simplicity has more value than power (as long as we can deliver software that meets our requirements). It is similar to point 4 in the "Problems with the Blub Paradox" section.
One of the problems is who decides what is too simple. E.g. why are for loops, function calls and lamdbas considered simple enough to be in go, but generics aren't?
When I TA'ed CS introductory courses, student usually had a lot less trouble with understanding generics than lambdas.
Not including feature X in programming language Y will also ensure that no-one who primarily uses Y will ever come to understand or appreciate X.
The blub paradox basically represents the opinion that it is always better for languages to include more powerful features.
I think that goes too far, working primarily in Scala I am seeing firsthand how much diminishing returns extra complexity in the language can have, but I'm certainly of the opinion that Go leans too heavily toward handicapping the language in pursuit of simplicity.
The complexity from generics isn't from the conceptual standpoint, it's from the resulting code standpoint... for the same reason that the ternary ?: operator is "too complex": it's really easy to say that `foo := cond ? 1 : 0` is better than the if/else alternative, but `foo := (a > (b.Active() ? Compare(b, a) : useDefault() ? DEFAULT : panic()) ? "worked" : "failed"` is a mess waiting to happen.
Same with generics. It's easy to point to simple examples. It hard to ensure that terrible metaprogramming monstrosities don't arise.
It's possible to write bad code with go as it is, but it's actually difficult to make such bad code inscrutable.
Maybe, but the solution to this is not to say: Only the compiler implementers are smart enough people to not create messy code with generics, only a few built-in data types are allowed to be generic and the rest will have to copy-paste implementations or use lose type information through `interface {}`
FYI, reified generics undermine type safety and correctness in general, which is one of the reasons why so few languages support the concept (another is that erased generics allow for easier interoperability and for the creation of a much wider class of static type systems).
In my experience, most people who think they need reified generics don't really understand them and can actually do fine with much safer concepts expressed on an erased runtime.
It is because some people here who have no stake in Go programing seem extraordinarily angry or maybe just concerned that why the hell Go authors didn't just override Go programmers' and listened only to enlightened PL experts here and at Reddit.
If it were a topic of gender or race instead of programing language I am sure this behavior would be called out as mansplaining/whitesplaining.
I do wish some term like 'PLsplaining' be used for this infuriating behavior of calling Go/PHP or whatever programmers clueless.
Having used C#, C/C++, Ruby, Perl, PHP, and Javascript, I find golang to be one of the most refreshing approaches to programming among them all. I think many people are finding themselves feeling upset because they are convinced that the simplicity of golang implies only idiots use it which then must mean that the language will be a failure (almost at an a priori level).
> It also really makes me wonder if I am living in some sort of alternate reality. I am a professional programmer working at a large company and I am pretty sure that 95% of my colleagues (myself included, as difficult as it is for me to admit)
What are you and your co-workers using aside from Go?
Mostly C and C++. Personally I am working in a C++ codebase right now and I struggle with all sorts of finicky cross-compilation and linking problems that just wouldn't exist in Go.
We also do some Python and Javascript for scripts and web work.
I don't think anyone has been arguing against it's ease of use nor the ease of readability. Most people seem to be against it's ergonomics and intentional lack of features.
I like Go and it's intentional lack of feature or very slow speed of adding features is my favorite feature. May be I am a pseudo programmer like most people who dislike Go would probably say.
I'm not saying it's a good language or not. I haven't written in it enough to determine that. I know enough to say that anyone who says it's not a "Real Programming Language" is full of it.
It also really makes me wonder if I am living in some sort of alternate reality. I am a professional programmer working at a large company and I am pretty sure that 95% of my colleagues (myself included, as difficult as it is for me to admit) have no idea what a reified generic is. I have run into some problems where being able to define custom generic containers would be nice, but I don't feel like that has seriously hindered my ability to deliver safe, functional, and maintainable software.
What I appreciate most about Go is that I am sure that I can look at 99% of the Go code written in the world and I can understand it immediately. When maintaining large code bases with many developers of differing skill levels, this advantage can't be understated. That is the reason there are so many successful new programs popping up in Go with large open-source communities. It is because Go is accessible and friendly to people of varying skill levels, unlike most of the opinions expressed in this thread.