Ask HN: Programming – what changed your mind about a language or feature?

When I first had heard about Go (golang) I was severely unimpressed. Good support for multi-threaded programming was nice, but the rest of the language seemed like a step (or two) backwards.

Then I ran across this talk by Rob Pike:

https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article

What really impressed me about Go was the attention to detail on all the little things that are annoying in C and related languages. How they decided to re-order how variable declarations are done, things like that.

It was about paying attention to the "ergonomics" of programming that impressed me.

I took on a project in Java (web backend project) a few months ago, first Java experience, I was excited.

After a couple months, the gratuitous (or what felt like gratuitous to me at least) verbosity of the language and all sort of abstractions and intricate relationship of classes/interfaces in libraries (the typical Java programmer mindset) drove me insane. Icing on the cake was the atrocity of frameworks (had to work with a legacy Spring codebase) and the need for using an extremely complicated IDE with a billion options and knobs in order to write any sort of code.

I was incredibly happy when I finished and deeply regretted taking on that work. I didn't think it would have been that bad.

I think if Java was my only option, I'd probably switch to a different non-programming career.

To put things in perspective, I am a C (kernel development)/C++ (system programming)/Go (backend development) programmer usually, working with tmux+vim and respective plugins for lightweight code completion and navigation.

Yes I was able to make concise higher functions and iterate them. Before I went through learning Racket I was doing a lot of repeating things with slightly different changes. I figured out how to attack the problem in a repeatable concise way.