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Why Go gets criticized so much

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Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#91

Post by zanny »

sievebrain wrote: post #53
gizmo wrote: post #28

I think there is a better explanation for why people dislike Go. All programming languages currently used for the web have gigantic downsides. They're slow. They have terrible package management. They have poor standard libraries. They have no static typing. They have no visual debuggers. They have no good IDE support. They don't integrate well with frontend code. Some programming languages are more flawed than other…

"All" languages used for the web have those downsides? This is part of why Go culture scares me a bit. You seem to be overlooking the huge amounts of software written in .NET and on the JVM, none of which suffers from the problems you just outlined: there are great IDEs, decent type systems, good interactive debuggers, strong standard libraries, reasonable package management etc. This mental blind spot towards the to…

Java and C# have a first class ideology (object oriented) that does not align well with functional web servers which is how almost everyone writes theirs nowadays.

These languages are getting better about it, but they are tacking on functional programming to a language that traditionally was strictly OO, and in the same way C++ has a lot of edge case behavior in being "OO tacked onto imperative" these languages suffer similarly.

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#93

Post by jfaucett »

The gap between the premises and conclusion of this argument seems broad to me...

Here's the summary: (leaving out some smaller arguments i.e. scala/rust vs Go language philosophy)

1. Go challenges peoples identity.

2. Challenging peoples identity makes them respond emotionaly not logicaly.

3. Other people are being deceived into liking Go.

4. People become more vocal as they attempt to sway the deceived from their erroneous path.

5. (conclusion): Therefore, everyone criticizes Go so much.

Notice all the premises could be true, but they would not strongly imply the "so much" part i.e. "a lot". It would just mean some people would respond more vocally/emotionaly, certainly not everyone.

Anyway, I think there's still some missing premise(s) which would explain why there is "a lot of" criticism for Go, if that is the case - I have no idea as I'm not involved with Go at all.

Anyone care to fill those in for me?

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#94

Post by jb613 »

acron0 wrote: post #68
jb613 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I dislike Go because I agree with the criticisms of it and I'm afraid I might end up having to maintain code written in it one day" and: "I also don't like Go much, but it's not because it challenges my identity" You are EXACTLY who the article is talking about. One of Go's selling points is maintainability. Go's inherent bias towards maintainability challenges your identity.

Isn't that fairly subjective? Some people find Lisp hard to parse and therefore to maintain but that doesn't mean it's inherently unmaintainable.

Yes totally subjective - different people work on different projects which eventually opinions are formed from.

I don't think Go was intended to improve upon any Lisp deficiency.

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#95

Post by mwsherman »

Attributing a person’s preferences to identity is just ad hominem. That doesn’t even imply it’s wrong or mean-spirited; it just means that it’s “preferable” to talk about a person’s motives. Very Kahneman.

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#96

Post by spyspy »

sievebrain wrote: post #71
doki_pen wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the engineer who wrote the code understood the problem well and was a decent engineer, then the code will be maintainable no matter what the language is. Understanding the problem well is very rarely achieved.

The issue is not "is the code maintainable" or "does Go lead to unmaintainable code". The issue is, do I wish to spend my days debugging code and writing more code, in Go? I used languages with Go's limitations back in the 1990's. I don't want to go back.

Writing and debugging code in Go is extremely more pleasurable than debugging, say, python. I write Go all day while our data scientists write python. Unfortunately python gives those guys enough rope to hang themselves and me too. It's simply harder (not impossible of course) to write unmaintainable code in a limited, static language like go.

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#97

Post by JulianMorrison »

falcolas wrote: post #41
JulianMorrison wrote: post #22

Why would anyone think Go and Rust are bitter rivals? They're great tools for different things, with a broad margin of overlap.

Ultimately, they share a space - compiled, memory safe, and aimed at server-side development. The way they differ is mostly in how they approach memory safety, which gives them different performance characteristics.

Go is about making every distraction from the thing you want to do go away. There's only one way to do it, built in and good enough. Batteries are included. Compiling is painless. Deploying is painless. Just add algorithm.

Rust (which I understand less) seems to be about making a program that does exactly and only what you said, including deterministic memory. The safety is less about a general intent to be safe, and more about guaranteeing invariants that are needed by deterministic memory deallocation. Its natural hunting ground is real time - any program that has to finish things by deadlines.

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#98

Post by [deleted] »

sievebrain wrote: post #71
doki_pen wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the engineer who wrote the code understood the problem well and was a decent engineer, then the code will be maintainable no matter what the language is. Understanding the problem well is very rarely achieved.

The issue is not "is the code maintainable" or "does Go lead to unmaintainable code". The issue is, do I wish to spend my days debugging code and writing more code, in Go? I used languages with Go's limitations back in the 1990's. I don't want to go back.

[deleted]

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#99

Post by cdnsteve »

sievebrain wrote: post #7

I 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…

Bad code is bad code regardless of language. Some languages just make writing bad code more palpable than others.

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#100

Post by glennsl »

sievebrain wrote: post #7

I 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 don't dislike Go. I just think there are zero use cases where Go is the best choice. But what I do dislike is when people try to hype and con others into adopting a language to justify and increase the return on their own time investment.
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