My favorite Rust function

> An X200 is also an ancient machine. Do you value your own time so little? Clearly you are annoyed by the compile times?

I value my security first and foremost. My X200 has zero binary blobs running on the machine, it also has several other properties that I appreciate.

> You can get a $200 CPU that will blast through a kernel compile in 3 minutes.

That assumes that I even have the money to afford that. Not all of us live in silicon valley.

> Maybe you're referring to --release compilation?

Indeed.

> > or making the language unacceptably crippled like Go

> ... if the only takeaway from Go for you is that it is “unacceptably crippled” then I feel you have missed a lot of insight.

Perhaps the author used a poor choice of words and instead could have phrased their intent along the lines of:

Go lacks the semantic density needed to express solutions in both a concise and consistent manner.

Were this the case, it would be hard to disagree as Go does, indeed, lack linguistic capabilities present in other programming languages which enable developers to encode system constraints within the language itself. Some might see this as a benefit, but I do not. YMMV.

A similar philosophy of "keep the language dirt-simple so anyone can code in it" was a driving force behind Java (the language) and JavaScript. What people have discovered is that when a programming language does not assist in expressing intrinsic problem complexity explicitly, it becomes implicitly intertwined within the source itself.

Go is crippled. I know you disagree, but I can tell you why you disagree and why you are wrong. Simply put, you do not have enough knowledge to know why GO is crippled.

Allow me to elucidate.. Imagine that you never knew about the concept of a negative number. You only knew about natural numbers. And for 5 years that's all you worked with... positive numbers. This does not mean you are inn-effective working with your positive numbers it does not say anything about your abilities at working with Natural numbers, you could be a an expert natural number mathematician.

However it does say that you are missing knowledge about numbers and that your knowledge is in a way (crippled)

Go is exactly this. Go is missing some very basic primitives that should be intrinsic to modern type systems in programming. If you had knowledge of "negative numbers" this would look like a gaping hole within GO's "number system." However if you have no knowledge of this, you would be completely unaware of the gaping hole and you could be unaware of it for half a decade. You may even get offended when someone comments on your knowledge being "crippled"

Go is missing:

1. Enumerations... or some way of representing elements of a set within a type system. This is a fundamental concept needed to create a type. Unless you played with languages like Agda or Idris it's hard to see why enumerations are so fundamental and so important.

2. Sum types (while having product types) Go has structs but doesn't have Variant types which is a huge gaping hole in the type system as it uses products to return errors.

3. Recursive types.

4. Parametric Polymorphism (probably the most well known missing feature that is by many considered unneeded)

You may not have fully understood all the concepts mentioned so I'm going to illustrate a very common problem go has that other modern typed languages don't have.

The GO type system is not powerful enough to hold a JSON type because it is missing fundamental primitives of types.

In python and javascript and ruby I can parse JSON and put it in a variable. In GOLANG I have to guess all the possible permutations of the incoming JSON type in order to hold it in a variable. This is 100% because GO is missing properties 1, 2 and 3 from above.

There is no this in GOLANG:

   x := parseJSON("[1,2,3]")

But there is in practically every other modern language.

There is an implicit "for my use-case" following "unacceptably crippled". So, go is not "unacceptably crippled" for the use case of creating a ton of small, simple, easily maintainable services at Uber, but it might be "unacceptably crippled" for the use case of having fun with type systems, or whatever the author was interested in at the time they were considering go as an option.