3.5 Years, 500k Lines of Go

Grabcocque is not advocating for less in the marketplace of ideas. He's advocating for quality criticism.

But what are you trying to say? That grabcocque doesn't think there's more than one way to do things? That he's a snob? That he should get over himself? Why do you hide your derogatory speech behind implications and snideness?

You're now the third person in the past couple of weeks I've seen who are insisting that the only explanation is that Go language users must be ignorant of all these other wonderful features.

But I'd say that in order for that to be true, you must believe that there is a large number of Go programmers who either learned Go for their first language, or their other languages they know are all bereft of these features.

That sounds superficially more appealing in the abstract, but when you try to concretize what languages the Go programmers could possibly be migrating from that don't have these features it gets a lot harder. When I tried this recently on /r/programming, I had at least one commenter suggest that maybe a lot of people learning Go might be coming from Visual Basic. I'm not sure how serious they were being, because I honestly couldn't tell if they were being funny or seriously reaching for the argument that Go programmers must all be coming from Visual Basic.

Because the only practically-likely language that fits the bill is C, and I still don't think there are all that many Go programmers who came to Go from a position of knowing only C.

Personally, I use Go a lot at work, tend not to be too pissed off about it (though certainly every once in a while, I am), and I know Haskell. I don't just mean "I can write the fib function", I mean, I wrote code that used conduits, lenses (the "real" ekmett version, and a non-trivial use where I passed lenses themselves around as first-class objects, not just as a field-accessor library), forkIO, STM, a custom monad, typeclasses, and a type family, so not just a casual "I can write the hi/low guessing game in Haskell".

The key is that what I'm looking for in a work language diverges from what I'm looking for in a personal fun language. I've actually learned (from experience!) to be really nervous about the code that FP ethusiasts and snobs produce in a professional context... FP code that strives to use every cool feature possible is often quite poor from most objective standards. Since I actually understand the paradigms in question, I can often see that they are either using features where they don't belong, or even at times outright misunderstanding and misusing them. On a couple of occasions I've even had to clean it up, so if I sound a bit bitter here, well... it's earned. There is a time and a place for code that uses the minimal feature set possible to get the job done, even if that means a few more lines of code and even if it means some programmers might find what they are writing distasteful to their refined palettes, and generally large-scale collaborative code is such a place.

I know what masters can do with functional programming. I've seen their work in the Haskell community. (I fall into the set of people who looooove the ekmett lens library, which even a good chunk of the Haskell community finds "a bit much".) There's a lot more people who can create a snarled complicated ball of "features" than there are those masters, though, and if you work with more than a couple of carefully-selected people, you'll be working with them, not the masters.

I'll submit another explanation for your consideration: A lot of us do understand those other features, and we actually, truly do find that where we are using Go, it is not catastrophic that they are missing. Instead of ignorance, what if instead it is a matter of different priorities and different problems resulting in different optimal solutions?

Sadly yes, today I learned C# is a programming language for 10x programmers.

Grabcocque is not advocating for anything, but attacking the article and go enthusiasts. There is no criticism to Go as a language presented, only criticism of those that claim to be productive in it.

In fact in its original form the comment contained only the link to the blub article and nothing else. This isn't enlightened discourse, this is a knee-jerk reaction :)