Go generics are not bad • Hacker News Board

Re: Go generics are not bad

#301

Post by stouset » Mon, Jul 11, 2022, 3:45 PM UTC

silisili wrote: post #167

danielscrubs wrote: post #87

Either you start making a language from a sound theoretical foundation and then implement it (Koka springs to mind) or you implement a language from some syntactic gripes and then try to find the theoretical foundation later… Go was impressive in the practical sense (compiler speed, channels in std and good tooling) but a shit show otherwise. I’ve completely lost any confidence that FANG will be able to make some gre…

Go is odd in that people constantly complain about what it cannot do or does incorrectly, while having become one of the most prolific languages at the same time.

C++ is wildly prolific, and yet it is under constant criticism. Most people in my experience (even C++ proponents) would agree that much of that criticism is reasonable, even if there's a subset of C++ that can be carefully used to create reliable software.

Go is odd in that its proponents seem to flatly deny any of the very reasonable criticisms levied against it. And they continue to do so right up until the moment that the language authors finally address them.

Re: Go generics are not bad

#302

Post by stouset » Mon, Jul 11, 2022, 3:48 PM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #155

mcronce wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the definition of "success" here? Popularity?

As I understand it, Google's rationale for Go is to enable them to hire a lot of say, good-but-not-great fresh CS graduates with little or no practical experience and produce software at their scale without putting those new hires through a multi-year training programme. So the definition of success is that Go makes those people productive. If you give these fresh hires C++, now everything is on fire and even experie…

> As I understand it, Google's rationale for Go is to enable them to hire a lot of say, good-but-not-great fresh CS graduates with little or no practical experience and produce software at their scale without putting those new hires through a multi-year training programme.

From my discussions with employees at Google, the rationale for Go is to keep a large staff of promising CS graduates busy on dead-end projects (while preventing them from causing too much damage) until something takes off and they need to actually put some of that spare headcount to use.

Re: Go generics are not bad

#303

Post by ratww » Mon, Jul 11, 2022, 7:51 PM UTC

Matl wrote: post #300

ratww wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason I'm focusing on the fidget spinner guy and you because those are a grandparent of the posts we're currently writing and replying to. If I wanted to reply to the other posts I would do so below those posts. I merely upvoted PhilippGille because he provided a good answer and continued with my day. We're in a chain of comments. I suggest clicking on "parent" until you get to the post I'm talking about and you…

The parent to my original comment states: > No it's simpler than that, they hate Go cause it's a half-assed language. The creators didn't respect developers enough to make it consistent and complete cause "devs are not smart enough". If that isn't the definition of flamebait and a personal attack, I don't know what is. It certainly is far enough from a measured, concrete suggestions for improvements to the language.

Once again, this comment was crude but factual, and it was answering to a bait/attack post in the first place. And go is indeed a simpler language by philosophy that is widely criticised for lacking certain features that a lot of people consider important, and it is made for productivity according to the authors. About the "not smart enough" part, it's not a real quote, but isn't quite the exaggeration. Here's a real quote by Rob Pike:

"The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt" – Rob Pike @ Lang Next 2014, From Parallel to Concurrent

Now read the parent of that post, about the "type system fidget spinner" and you'll see what a flamebait and well disguised personal-attack looks like. Or yours, to see a real personal attack that got flagged and is now marked as dead.

Re: Go generics are not bad

#304

Post by bborud » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 9:41 AM UTC

grumpyprole wrote: post #297

bborud wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you like or don't like isn't really the point. The point is that it isn't unimportant when judging how "good" a language is to take into account how many people are willing to use it. It is hard to argue that a language is "good" when a negligible fraction of developers are willing to use it.

As Alan Kay said, the industry is a pop culture, driven by marketing not science. I'm still going to argue for good ideas though.

If one is to come up with an excuse for not understanding people, one should pick something that at least sounds plausible.

Re: Go generics are not bad

#305

Post by hota_mazi » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 1:30 PM UTC

iasay wrote: post #233

hota_mazi wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Rust, Haskell, Kotlin, yes. They force you to consider the error path. Go makes it all too easy to just ignore errors and produce crashy code.

Go makes it explicit where the error was ignored so you can go and wring the neck of the bastard who ignored it :)

Sure, but the compiler doesn't care, and that's the problem.