▲ 8 ▼ Notes on the Go language after spending a few weeks building a large project in it

brandur.org posted by kenny 3156 days ago

Overall, I never quite reached the level of feverish passion for Go that many others have, but I consider it a thoroughly solid language that’s pleasant to work with. Furthermore, it may have reached the best compromise that we’ve seen so far in the landscape of contemporary languages in that it imposes constraints that are strong enough to detect large classes of problems during compilation, but is still fluid enough to work with that it’s easy to learn and fast to develop.

▲ kenny 3156 days ago ▼

The commmunity: Reading the mailings lists can be still be pretty depressing. Every critique of the language or suggestion for improvement, no matter how valid, is met with a barrage of either “you’re doing it wrongs”, or “only the Go core team that can have thoughts that are worth consideration”. Previously this level of zealotry had been reserved for holy crusades and text editors.

I particularly liked this bit, though it's not a problem confined to the Go language - it seems every language has this problem at some point, as people find post-hoc justifications for every decision. The other side of this of course is that it becomes tiresome to see the same criticisms repeated from a position of ignorance, so it's understandable that people develop defence mechanisms, one of which is to say that someone is doing it wrong...

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