Comment by cdoxsey
8 years ago
Programming is as much about communicating with your peers as it is about getting the computer to do what you want. Go's inflexibility results in uniform code which makes it easier to understand.
Macros allow you to introduce dialects which can be powerful in their expressiveness but often result in significant departures from the original language.
When someone new comes into the project they have to learn the dialect before they can even read the code. More often than not they give up and rewrite the code from scratch in a language they understand.
Sometimes additions to the language make sense, but there's a real cost, a cost that often gets ignored. Do it to much and you kill the golden goose.
I agree with the first point, but not the second.
The go language seems more than anything to be "you can use our language, but it serves us and our wants first and foremost."
Now, I like the enforced style guide. That's not my gripe. It's that go deliberately treats certain platforms as second class, deliberately treats feature requests as second class if they are not complementary to what the original creators intents.
I don't wanna get shot for opening the can of worms about generics for the millionth time, but it just seemed like such an obvious solution to a widespread, pervasive, irritating problem. It was an issue early on, before there was really a lot of back-compat surface to even think about, but it wasn't what the Google posse wanted, and it didn't happen.
In the case of go, I believe the true cost of making it better is that Google is learning that when you use an internal product for a wide array of projects, and then later on you decide to flesh it out and open source it, you lose the ability to react to your audience as easily and that also narrows the surface for people to come in fresh to the project and contribute or provide feedback.
Go shot it's own foot. We (non-googlers) certainly didn't do it to them.
All this aside, the technical prowess at work on the team, especially in the past twoish years has been really impressive. At least they have stellar developers.