Comment by booleandilemma
7 months ago
When I first learned about Go I thought the idea was to have a simple C-like language with a frozen feature set. A language that would look the same today and ten years from now. And I thought that boringness was a wonderful feature, actually.
If they're going to be adding features to the language, albeit at a slower pace than Java/C#, what's the point really? On a long enough timeline Go is going to be indistinguishable from these more feature-rich languages.
> When I first learned about Go I thought the idea was to have a simple C-like language with a frozen feature set.
C is a C-like language with a mostly frozen feature set. (If you want something less insane than C, there's also Pascal.)
C is not frozen.
C11 added generics, multi-threading, unicode support, static assertions. It broken compatibility with earlier versions by removing `gets` function.
C23 added `nullptr`, very fundamental change. typeof operator. auto keyword for type inference. Lots of breaking changes by introducing new keywords. Another breaking change is empty brackets `()` now mean as function taking no arguments.
So lots of new features and breaking changes with every new iteration. Thankfully, compilers support sane standards, so you can just use `-ansi` and live happy life, I guess...
> A language that would look the same today and ten years from now.
You can still write Go 1.11 code and compile it with the Go 1.24 compiler. If you specify 1.11 in your go.mod it compiles your code with the 1.11 syntax.