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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Counter point: Generics make me far more inclined to use Go regularly. If error handling is improved to be safer and more ergonomic, it'll be incredibly compelling for me. Generics were the biggest feature keeping me from using the language, and now that's a done deal. I'm excited.
If you consider the adoption rate, it's pretty clear that the people who avoid Go because of are a vocal minority.
This is very exciting! Generics will be helpful for some, I'm sure, but my reading of the winds is that people will find other idiosyncracies of Go to latch onto and complain about. It seems to me the next object of hatred is the lack of sum types. I would like to understand a bit more about where a lot of the Go criticism comes from. Of course some amount of it comes from direct frustrations people have with the lan…
I'm a big Go proponent, and I'm pretty "meh" on generics. They'll make some code easier to read and write, but they'll make a lot of code a lot harder to read (because contrary to popular belief, "readability" doesn't always increase with abstraction or terseness).
That said, sum types would genuinely be helpful--the workarounds are error prone (making sure all cases are handled by code) and inefficient (unnecessary allocations if the implementation is backed by interfaces or wasted memory if it's struct with a field per variant). Note that simply supporting sum types doesn't guarantee that they'll be implemented efficiently--I'm afraid of the possibility that the Go community might settle for an interface-based implementation rather than a union-based implementation.
On balance, however, Go is still the most productive language I've ever used (and by a healthy margin). People make way too big a deal about type system minutia (having a basic type system is important, but going too far beyond that can be counterproductive) and they are far too forgiving for things like bad tooling, poor performance, or impoverished standard libaries.
This is very exciting! Generics will be helpful for some, I'm sure, but my reading of the winds is that people will find other idiosyncracies of Go to latch onto and complain about. It seems to me the next object of hatred is the lack of sum types. I would like to understand a bit more about where a lot of the Go criticism comes from. Of course some amount of it comes from direct frustrations people have with the lan…
Personally, lack of generics never kept me out of Go. I did a lot of programming in it for about a year when 1.0 first dropped. I think it is a fine language, both with and without generics.
I do prefer simpler languages though - those that give me broad tools to accomplish many tasks rather than many tools to accomplish specific tasks.
This is very exciting! Generics will be helpful for some, I'm sure, but my reading of the winds is that people will find other idiosyncracies of Go to latch onto and complain about. It seems to me the next object of hatred is the lack of sum types. I would like to understand a bit more about where a lot of the Go criticism comes from. Of course some amount of it comes from direct frustrations people have with the lan…
Go is Blub (http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html). I think the industry is in a place where Blub makes sense! Lots of VC money is floating around, and schools are training a lot of people to hire with that money. Commercially relevant ideas most often succeed by raising a ton of money, then hiring a ton of people to realize the vision. In the Blub essay's terms, a modern company doesn't want to beat the average, they want to reliably hit the average with the 10s or 100s of people they're hiring.
This resembles the conditions at Google when Golang was conceived, a lot more than the "4 people want to max their individual leverages, whilst eating rice and beans to extend their runway" world the Blub essay was inspired by.
This is very exciting! Generics will be helpful for some, I'm sure, but my reading of the winds is that people will find other idiosyncracies of Go to latch onto and complain about. It seems to me the next object of hatred is the lack of sum types. I would like to understand a bit more about where a lot of the Go criticism comes from. Of course some amount of it comes from direct frustrations people have with the lan…
> It seems to me the next object of hatred is the lack of sum types. Sum types may be coming in a close future release, since the notation type T interface { int | string } that can currently only be used for constraints on type parameters can be “easily” made to be a runtime thing as well. I cannot find the GitHub issue right now (perhaps, it wasn't an issue, but a comment in a very long thread, and GitHub is being…
type Number interface { int | int64 | int32 }
var n Number
This is very exciting! Generics will be helpful for some, I'm sure, but my reading of the winds is that people will find other idiosyncracies of Go to latch onto and complain about. It seems to me the next object of hatred is the lack of sum types. I would like to understand a bit more about where a lot of the Go criticism comes from. Of course some amount of it comes from direct frustrations people have with the lan…
WOOO! I have been using the RC at work lately, and I have to say: The generics implementation is quite nice, and RUTHLESSLY slashes boilerplate and copy-pasta. This is going to turn Golang from "that one boilerplate-y language without generics" into my favorite language. I've been using the https://github.com/samber/lo library, and it is very nice to be able to do "map/reduce/etc..." on golang structs. I would really…
Kidding, I always mentioned that CLU like would be good enough.
This is very exciting! Generics will be helpful for some, I'm sure, but my reading of the winds is that people will find other idiosyncracies of Go to latch onto and complain about. It seems to me the next object of hatred is the lack of sum types. I would like to understand a bit more about where a lot of the Go criticism comes from. Of course some amount of it comes from direct frustrations people have with the lan…
People are upset that their favourite language didn't get as popular as Go.
Not worried, just pleased it is finally catching up with modern times.
This is very exciting! Generics will be helpful for some, I'm sure, but my reading of the winds is that people will find other idiosyncracies of Go to latch onto and complain about. It seems to me the next object of hatred is the lack of sum types. I would like to understand a bit more about where a lot of the Go criticism comes from. Of course some amount of it comes from direct frustrations people have with the lan…
Go is really s souped up version of C. It's a design rooted in the 70s with some fixes to make it a good language for writing small networked apps.
Insofar as that goes¹, the language is fine.
However the creators of Go responded to critiques of the language in a patronizing manner and talked down to their own programming community at Google as being unable to handle complex languages.
Basically the Go community got the exchange off on the wrong foot. Personally, I sense egos were at stake. They created a language which is simple by design, but then still wanted to claim a sort of opinionated superiority for it.
If they'd said, "oh go is just a simple little language we enjoy using for such and such, perhaps you will too" then people who don't like Go wouldn't have felt provoked.
1: Pun not intended.