The perfect language and why Go still isn't it
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Re: The perfect language and why Go still isn't it
#2Go isn’t the perfect language because it doesn’t intend to be. Likely, as this article seems to hint at, there’s no such thing and there never will be. Go has a well defined set of design goals (including simple and pragmatic) that it has achieved.
Re: The perfect language and why Go still isn't it
#3There's never going to be a perfect language -- stick with what gets the work done for the situation at hand.
Also make some popcorn and enjoy the Twitter flame wars while you're at it.
Re: The perfect language and why Go still isn't it
#4The perfect language is the one humans won't have to write.
Re: The perfect language and why Go still isn't it
#5This already exists, but it isn't trendy.
It's FreePascal. Nobody believes me, but we have perfection already. No crap you don't need. No crazy corner cases. No C++ templated metaprogramming lambda auto pointer garbage. No "I can't write a linked list without a Grimoire" Rust.
It's great. You get a ton done, and simply ignore the language wars. No VM trash (Java). No web trash (JavaScript/"Webasm"). No crap.
Try all the others, and try FreePascal. It's old enough that people aren't bolting on stupid shit. The community is awesome. Everybody just gets shit done. There's a lot of art if you go looking, but none of it requires a kilopage book to describe.
Re: The perfect language and why Go still isn't it
#6This already exists, but it isn't trendy. It's FreePascal. Nobody believes me, but we have perfection already. No crap you don't need. No crazy corner cases. No C++ templated metaprogramming lambda auto pointer garbage. No "I can't write a linked list without a Grimoire" Rust. It's great. You get a ton done, and simply ignore the language wars. No VM trash (Java). No web trash (JavaScript/"Webasm"). No crap. Try all…
As much as I like Pascal, and I am a big fan since Turbo Pascal since version 4 for MS-DOS, using all of them until about Delphi 3, lack of some kind of automatic memory management is a killer for anyone that cares about code security.
Delphi only supports it for COM and Objective-c/Swift interoperability, everything else is as manual as TP for MS-DOS, and I bet FP hasn't improved in that regard.
Re: The perfect language and why Go still isn't it
#7Languages are software products like everything else, so they either improve to cater for their "customers" and survive against competition, or they wither and die into some kind of maintenance corner.
Even languages that supposedly no one uses like Fortran and Cobol, get their standards revisited every couple of years.
One might not want to re-write that surviving Cobol program into a reactive text UI with a couple of FactoryFactory classes, but it is surely possible as per latest language features.
Re: The perfect language and why Go still isn't it
#8Go is actually pretty close to the perfect language to me -- for "general purpose" computing, at least. Sure, it's plain and somewhat boring to write but it doesn't make me that much less productive. Error handling and generics are the only other features that I want, so I'm really looking forward to Go 2, if that ever comes around. I would be happy to see Go declared "feature-complete" at that point, similar to Elixir [1].
But even then, if I want to have fun and feel like I'm learning new things while I code, I'll always use something else that's more interesting.
[1]: https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2019/06/24/elixir-v1-9-0-releas...
Re: The perfect language and why Go still isn't it
#9Language can't be small, if it's universal enough. Otherwise you end up with trade-offs for its size, which limit scenarios where that language can be used.
So there is no "perfect" language. All languages have some trade-offs. If you want small - you pay for it.
Re: The perfect language and why Go still isn't it
#10Go isn't even close. It has an interesting runtime though.