Comment by tharne
4 years ago
> There's a large part of the industry that thinks we should limit ourselves to concepts that can be understood by a beginner
I've never fully understood this weird obsession either. You'd never hear a group of master craftsmen like plumbers or masons talking about making their tools and trade more "beginner friendly". They naturally expect beginners to learn the trade and eventually become masters themselves.
The cynic in me thinks it's large corporations that are pushing the whole "beginner friendly" narrative as a way to keep employees both 1) lower-skilled and 2) productive. If you help beginners develop into intermediate and then advanced programmers, guess what? You have to pay them more.
> If you help beginners develop into intermediate and then advanced programmers, guess what? You have to pay them more.
That doesn't seem like a good argument with regards to Go specifically, since Go is among the most high-paying technologies, at least according to Stack Overflow surveys[1]. At the same level as “LISP” (which Lisp is it, StackOverflow?) and only slightly below Rust and Scala, both of which are way more complex languages.
[1]: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#section-top-p...
> Go is among the most high-paying technologies
I like go just fine, and I'm learning it as we speak. But I think the high pay scale has more to do with *where* it's being used more than anything else.
Go is very popular in SV, whereas most fortune 500 and other legacy companies are java world.
My issue is more with this current obsession that everything must be beginner friendly. The fact is beginners don't stay beginners very long, so it's a dumb group to optimize for.
I don't think this is a very good analogy. The craftsmen I know use basic, simple tools that work well. They just handle them masterfully. The more complex tools are often for beginners who need the hand holding.