Comment by sametmax
8 years ago
> It makes me feel like the language creators of Golang purposefully decide that users of the language aren’t smart.
If they are anything like Guido for Python, I think the idea is quite the contrary.
Language users are smart. Just too smart for their own good.
Like the coyotes we talked about recently on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17079369) who are "winning the mini-game of each human interaction, but they are losing the meta-game of what society will do if coyotes aren’t scared."
Well, just like that, language users with macros are winning the mini-game of their interaction with the current opened files in their editor, but they are loosing the meta game of maintainable projects, shareable knowledge and reusable tools.
Macros (or their small brother, "just a little DSL") are the most abuse feature in dev, period. They are too clever, the results almost never documented or even tested properly while often being very specific to the creator use cases.
I really think macros are one of the reasons why Lisp never became more popular: a small smart population love it for macros while the rest of the population just doesn't want to have to deal with all the macros BS created by the former population.
Same for Ruby. Honestly, having to go through yet another DSL du jour killed it for me.
So my guess is that the Goland creators know very well how smart the language users are. And they are afraid, very afraid.
.. and they're afraid, very afraid that if you give them that kind of power, they will make the creators roles irrelevant.
By echoing this in the echo chamber, we've perhaps deprived ourselves of getting enough collective experience with powerful programming tools to be able to establish good norms to teach high power maintainable programming. We're instead stuck in low level language wars.
Using type systems for system design anyone? Use Beta abstraction systematically?
> .. and they're afraid, very afraid that if you give them that kind of power, they will make the creators roles irrelevant.
That would be fantastic.
But right now most companies have a hard drive finding decent middle level dev.
Let's talk about your plan when american companies don't hire me to work from my bedroom in the south of France because they can't even find what they need in their own country anymore.
Unless you have a recipe to turn people that strugle with fizz buzz being able to magically understand complex abstractions.
> people that strugle with fizz buzz being able to magically understand complex abstractions
Are these the same ones who are "too smart for their own good"?
1 reply →