While I agree with the premise of the article, I don't think this is why I don't use Go. I don't hate Go, but I also don't think it brings anything new or elegant to the party. Languages like Rust and Elixir are exciting to me. Go just feels like a rerun of everything I've done before.
Why Go gets criticized so much
51–60 of 251 posts
Re: Why Go gets criticized so much
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do find the name extremely unfortunate. It's impossible to search for, as "go" is an extremely common word (bad for search engines) and substring (bad for ctrl-F find). I tried searching for shared web hosts that provide Go support and just gave up. Kind of hilarious to see a first-party Google language be impossible to search for.
Using "golang" instead of "Go" nearly always gives the correct results in my experience.
That's true-ish, although it seems unlikely that most marketing departments who would be putting together a web server page would use "golang" over "Go".
Edit: This would be solved if the language was called "golang," which is precisely the original poster's point.
Re: Why Go gets criticized so much
#53I think there is a better explanation for why people dislike Go. All programming languages currently used for the web have gigantic downsides. They're slow. They have terrible package management. They have poor standard libraries. They have no static typing. They have no visual debuggers. They have no good IDE support. They don't integrate well with frontend code. Some programming languages are more flawed than other…
"All" languages used for the web have those downsides?
This is part of why Go culture scares me a bit. You seem to be overlooking the huge amounts of software written in .NET and on the JVM, none of which suffers from the problems you just outlined: there are great IDEs, decent type systems, good interactive debuggers, strong standard libraries, reasonable package management etc.
This mental blind spot towards the tools and practices that a massive part of the software industry has been using for years is really odd.
Re: Why Go gets criticized so much
#54I've been using Go for several months and love it.
"People shouldn't like things I dislike." --waaaah
Re: Why Go gets criticized so much
#55Offtopic: Can we please use "GoLang" for the language, so we can use "Go" unambiguously for the game? Especially in titles, where there is little context.
I do find the name extremely unfortunate. It's impossible to search for, as "go" is an extremely common word (bad for search engines) and substring (bad for ctrl-F find). I tried searching for shared web hosts that provide Go support and just gave up. Kind of hilarious to see a first-party Google language be impossible to search for.
And the was another existing programming language called "Go" and Google being well Google just stomped on that and moved on calling theirs the same thing. It is a nice benefit of being a billion dollar company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go!_%28programming_language%29
Re: Why Go gets criticized so much
#56I would burn Go with fire and salt the earth because it's the bloody compiler will refuse to compile my valid code if I have unused imports or variables. It makes programming in Go a terrible experience and that's why I won't touch it.
Re: Why Go gets criticized so much
#57I don't hate Go. I do strongly dislike posts with clickbaity titles that have an admission the title is wrong in the very first sentence. The rest of the article is little better. It can be summed up in one line: People who dislike Go are upset because they incorporated their favourite programming language into their identity, and the success of Go challenges their own choices . Although I don't hate Go, I also don't…
"I dislike Go because I agree with the criticisms of it and I'm afraid I might end up having to maintain code written in it one day" and: "I also don't like Go much, but it's not because it challenges my identity" You are EXACTLY who the article is talking about. One of Go's selling points is maintainability. Go's inherent bias towards maintainability challenges your identity.
Selling points are not facts, they're just arguments people who are trying to sell something like to make.
Go's users and designers make all sorts of claims about it. As it happens, I've evaluated them and find that I often disagree with them.
For instance, Go projects often don't specify the versions of their dependencies and choose to just clone the code into their own source tree instead - if you're lucky. If you aren't then the project simply depends on whatever is found in the dependencies git master branch. I find this to be poor practice from several perspectives, maintainability amongst them.
Re: Why Go gets criticized so much
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
A great many programming languages aren't particularly searchable, especially when searching engines weren't up to todays standards yet. Things have improved, but I remember the dark days when looking for anything C# would shower you with C-related links.
Or how about searching for ".NET"? :)
It should be illegal for programmers to name anything they created ;)
Re: Why Go gets criticized so much
#59I think there is a better explanation for why people dislike Go. All programming languages currently used for the web have gigantic downsides. They're slow. They have terrible package management. They have poor standard libraries. They have no static typing. They have no visual debuggers. They have no good IDE support. They don't integrate well with frontend code. Some programming languages are more flawed than other…
I can really relate to your post. I heard about go at a time when i was angry against python for having no type hinting and started to see people build tools parsing types in code comments, and at the same time being furious against the gigantic bloat that the java enterprise web frameworks had become.
So, as you said, when i looked at go being a smart and small with a modern standard lib, and being modern in a way with its approach to interface programming i thought i would fall in love with it.
Then i saw go didn't have a single generic function for comparing two numbers, because the language wasn't generic enough, and i felt hugely disappointed.
Re: Why Go gets criticized so much
#60I don't hate Go. I do strongly dislike posts with clickbaity titles that have an admission the title is wrong in the very first sentence. The rest of the article is little better. It can be summed up in one line: People who dislike Go are upset because they incorporated their favourite programming language into their identity, and the success of Go challenges their own choices . Although I don't hate Go, I also don't…
If the engineer who wrote the code understood the problem well and was a decent engineer, then the code will be maintainable no matter what the language is. Understanding the problem well is very rarely achieved.