The simple existence of the Billion Dollar Mistake of nils would suggest that maybe Rob Pike et al are capable of getting it wrong.
> Much of the language design was motivated by learnings within Google.
And the main problem Google had at the time was a large pool of bright but green CS graduates who needed to be kept busy without breaking anything important until the mcompany needed to tap into that pool for a bigger initiative.
> What other "modern" language that has more of a focus on software engineering, putting readability and maintainability and stability at the forefront?
This presupposes that golang was designed for readability, maintainability, and stability, and I assert it was not.
We are literally responding to a linked post highlighting how golang engineers are still spending resources trying to avoid runtime nil panics. This was widely known and recognized as a mistake. It was avoidable. And here we are. This is far from the only counterexample to golang being designed for reliability, it’s just the easiest one to hit you over the head with.
Having worked on multiple large, production code bases in go, they are not particularly reliable nor readable. They are somewhat more brittle than other languages I’ve worked with as a rule. The lack of any real ability to actually abstract common components of problems means that details of problems end up needing to be visible to every layer of a solution up and down the stack. I rarely see a PR that doesn’t touch dozens of functions even for small fixes.
Ignoring individual examples, the literal one thing we actually have data on in software engineering is that fewer lines of codes correlates with fewer bugs and that fewer lines of code are easier to read and reason about.
And go makes absolutely indefensible decisions around things like error handling, tuple returns as second class citizens, and limited abstraction ability that inarguably lead to integer multiples more code to solve problems than ought to be necessary. Even if you generally like the model of programming that go presents, even if you think this is the overall right level of abstraction, these flagrant mistakes are in direct contradiction of the few learnings we actually have hard data for in this industry.
Speaking of data, I would love to see convincing data that golang programs are measurably
more reliable than their counterparts in other languages.
Instead of ever just actually acknowledging these things as flaws, we are told that Rob Pike designed the language so it must be correct. And we are told that writing three lines of identical error handling around every one line of code is just Being Explicit and that looping over anything not an array or map is Too Much Abstraction and that the plus sign for anything but numbers is Very Confusing but an `add` function is somehow not, as if these are unassailable truths about software engineering.
Instead of actually solving problems around reliability, we’re back to running a dozen linters on every save/commit. And this can’t be part of the language, because Go Doesn’t Have Warnings. Except it does, they’re just provided by a bunch of independent maybe-maintained tools.
> enable the creation of even more complex abstractions and concepts
We’re already working on top of ten thousand and eight layers of abstraction hidden by HTTP and DNS and TLS and IP networking over Ethernet frames processed on machines running garbage-collected runtimes that live-translate code into actual code for a processor that translates that code to actual code it understands, managed by a kernel that convincingly pretends to be able to run thousands of programs at once and pretends to each program that it has access to exabytes of memory, but yeah the ten thousand and ninth layer of abstraction is a problem.
Or maybe the real problem is that the average programmer is terrible at writing good abstractions so we spend eons fighting fires as a result of our collective inability to actually engineer anything. And then we argue that actually it’s abstraction that’s wrong and consign ourselves to never learning how to write good ones. The next day we find a library that cleanly solves some problem we’re dealing with and conveniently forget that Abstractions Are Bad because that’s only something we believe when it’s convenient.
Yes, this is a rant. I am tired of the constant gaslighting from the golang community. It certainly didn’t start with “generics are complicated and unnecessary and the language doesn’t need them”. I don’t know why I’m surprised it hasn’t stopped since them.