Comment by jact
1 day ago
I think with C or C++ devs, those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
I would criticize Go from the point of view of more modern languages that have powerful type systems like the ML family, Erlang/Elixir or even the up and coming Gleam. These languages succeed in providing powerful primitives and models for creating good, encapsulating abstractions. ML languages can help one entirely avoid certain errors and understand exactly where a change to code affects other parts of the code — while languages like Erlang provided interesting patterns for handling runtime errors without extensive boilerplate like Go.
It’s a language that hobbles developers under the aegis of “simplicity.” Certainly, there are languages like Python which give too much freedom — and those that are too complex like Rust IMO, but Go is at best a step sideways from such languages. If people have fun or get mileage out of it, that’s fine, but we cannot pretend that it’s really this great tool.
My biggest nitpick against Go was, is and still is the package management. Rust did it so nice and NuGet (C#/.NET) got it so right that Microsoft added it as a built-in thing for Visual Studio, it was originally a plugin and not from Microsoft whatsoever, now they fully own it which is fine, and it just works.
Cargo is amazing, and you can do amazing things with it, I wish Go would invest in this area more.
Also funny you mention Python, a LOT of Go devs are former Python devs, especially in the early days.
Which part of the package management/modules system do you find lacking?
Curious too because I find it mostly great.
> I would criticize Go from the point of view of more modern languages that have powerful type systems like the ML
Go release date: 2012
ML: 1997
You forgot: CLU 1977.
". They are likely the two most difficult parts of any design for parametric polymorphism. In retrospect, we were biased too much by experience with C++ without concepts and Java generics. We would have been well-served to spend more time with CLU and C++ concepts earlier."
https://go.googlesource.com/proposal/+/master/design/go2draf...
And still there are more modern idioms and language features that ML had in the 70s but are missing from Go. But, these have the fatal flaw of Not being Invented Here.