``Go is not meant to innovate programming theory. It’s meant to innovate programming practice." – Samuel Tesla http://go-lang.cat-v.org/ And as usual, http://9front.org/who/uriel/
Why Go gets criticized so much
31–40 of 251 posts
Re: Why Go gets criticized so much
#32> Go is the only recent language that takes the aforementioned 40 years of programming language research and tosses it out the window [ ... ] no pattern matching, there’s no borrowing, there’s no pure functional programming, there’s no immutable variables, there’s no option types, there’s no exceptions, there’s no classes, there’s no generics.
Some of this stuff is quite a bit older than 40 years. That only brings us back to 1976. Exceptions are around mid 1960's or so (PL/I, Lisp). Functional programming, Lisp again, 1958. (Java-like) OOP Classes? At least as far back as Simula-67. Simula-67 is where C++ gets "virtual" from.
Re: Why Go gets criticized so much
#33Offtopic: Can we please use "GoLang" for the language, so we can use "Go" unambiguously for the game? Especially in titles, where there is little context.
It's not even the first programming language named Go. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go!_%28programming_language%29
Re: Why Go gets criticized so much
#34``Go is not meant to innovate programming theory. It’s meant to innovate programming practice." – Samuel Tesla http://go-lang.cat-v.org/ And as usual, http://9front.org/who/uriel/
And as usual, http://9front.org/who/uriel/ Can you give some background?
spiritual leader of cat-v. good taster.
http://uriel.cat-v.org/profile
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9//uriel/index.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Lost.goblin
https://www.reddit.com/user/uriel
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4654125
https://www.facebook.com/archangel.uriel
Re: Why Go gets criticized so much
#35It's so easy to dismiss legitimate criticism of any issue as "hate" and "people are emotional" and "their identity is threatened".
At the end of the day, there is legitimate criticism of Go, just as there are legitimate advantages of using Go. As an additional fact, Go's core developers (and some users) have repetedly been dismissive of this criticism.
Re: Why Go gets criticized so much
#36I don't hate Go. I do strongly dislike posts with clickbaity titles that have an admission the title is wrong in the very first sentence. The rest of the article is little better. It can be summed up in one line: People who dislike Go are upset because they incorporated their favourite programming language into their identity, and the success of Go challenges their own choices . Although I don't hate Go, I also don't…
I agree the title's a bit baity.
But this part stuck out for me:
> When I first heard about Go, I thought "What? No exceptions? Pass."
Lo about 12-13 years ago I balked at Python's significant whitespace, but I came around. And rust's lack of exceptions, but I'm coming around. I think there's certainly something to be said for "identity" (maybe it makes more sense to describe it as prejudice/bias/context, but whatever).
I haven't given Go a fair eval yet so I can't say much (except I don't "hate" it.)
Re: Why Go gets criticized so much
#37Good points, and also correct answer. Identity is hard to question. But when you try Go without prejudice, it's just fun (and productive) afterwards.
With golang, it is incredibly easy to get productive fast. It's like modernized, safe C with good standard library and trivial deployment. Those are pretty good selling points for getting stuff actually done. Using Haskell for similar stuff is more tedious, even if a actual coding is more fun. I can see (and sometimes feel myself) the cognitive dissonance here.
I think the issue here is that you're comparing Go to C and Haskell.
C is decades old. Haskell was designed to help you write correct programs, rather than simplicity of use or productivity (or that's how I'd characterise it).
If you compared Go to C# or Java 8 or Scala, it'd probably look a lot worse. Deployment isn't so difficult that Go has any advantage in my experience: install a JVM on the server, ensure your build system is producing a fat jar, run it. Done.
With Capsule you can even make self-executable JARs that have a little shell script attached. Then you can run the program like any other UNIX app. chmod +x and ./execute it. Fully self contained, and can even update itself automatically.
Re: Why Go gets criticized so much
#38[deleted]
Re: Why Go gets criticized so much
#39Good points, and also correct answer. Identity is hard to question. But when you try Go without prejudice, it's just fun (and productive) afterwards.
With golang, it is incredibly easy to get productive fast. It's like modernized, safe C with good standard library and trivial deployment. Those are pretty good selling points for getting stuff actually done. Using Haskell for similar stuff is more tedious, even if a actual coding is more fun. I can see (and sometimes feel myself) the cognitive dissonance here.
> Using Haskell for similar stuff is more tedious, even if a actual coding is more fun. I can see (and sometimes feel myself) the cognitive dissonance here.
I don't think the same could be said for say, Scala or F# which offer many of the same paradigms but in a more flexible way though.
Re: Why Go gets criticized so much
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do find the name extremely unfortunate. It's impossible to search for, as "go" is an extremely common word (bad for search engines) and substring (bad for ctrl-F find). I tried searching for shared web hosts that provide Go support and just gave up. Kind of hilarious to see a first-party Google language be impossible to search for.
A great many programming languages aren't particularly searchable, especially when searching engines weren't up to todays standards yet. Things have improved, but I remember the dark days when looking for anything C# would shower you with C-related links.
Or how about searching for ".NET"? :)