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Comment by maccard

4 hours ago

There’s a fine line between being willing to change your mind and getting the basics wrong. Go has repeatedly gotten the basics wrong.

20 comments

maccard

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whoiskevin  4 hours ago

Declaring a highly successful language as having the basics wrong means that you are not correct about the basics that were needed.

  • maccard  4 hours ago

    Something can be highly succesful in spite of having glaring design flaws. Nobody is claiming go isn't wildly succesful, but it's _in spite_ of these issues. It was clear over a decade ago that iota, gopath, and lack of generics were massive kneecaps to the language; go changing it's mind on those things isn't progress it's just getting the fundamentals wrong.

    A good example of where they're kind of stuck is date formatting - it's stupid, unclear, and likely a mistake, but it's not a fundamental flaw; it's just a quirk.

    • 9rx  3 hours ago

      Why is iota a massive kneecap to the language? It is semantically identical to enum in C and Typescript.

      The trouble is that Rust is older than Go and it was already confusing people into thinking enums and sum types are the same thing, so by using slightly different syntax, iota, Go avoided the whole confusion of users thinking that enums would behave like sum types instead of actual enums.

      Is your attempt at making a point that not having sum types is the massive flaw? Sum types are a useful construct, to be sure, but there are plenty of good languages without them. That's more on the design quirk end, realistically.

      4 replies →

  • n6242  3 hours ago

    By that logic Windows would be the best operating system ever and perfect in every way, and anyone who disagrees must be wrong about how an OS should be.

  • jeswin  4 hours ago

    It's a highly successful language because (1) it was backed by Google, and (2) created by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson.

    If it came out of anywhere else, it might have struggled even to hit the homepage here.

  • boxed  3 hours ago

    The basics of a programming language were wrong. The basics of marketing were very right. Those are not the same.

  • 9rx  4 hours ago

    An engineer, of course, understands that there is no such thing as "wrong", only different tradeoffs, but with the rise of "vibe coding" you don't need to be an engineer to play in the world of programming anymore.