[the-tomster]

The author says that "all the problems listed here have already been solved" by Rust and Haskell. Great, so let's stop complaining about Go and use those languages instead.

Go has specifically rejected the complexity that these features introduce, both in the implementation of the language and the writing of programs in it. If you want those features, just use a language that has them. Some other people might not care about those features, and prefer the simplicity of Go, and that's fine too.

[dchesterton]

Precisely. Just because a language lacks certain features available in other languages doesn't mean it's not 'good'.

Things that are 'good' for me: Good concurrency primitives, single binary deployment with no dependencies, a language that can be picked up in a matter of days and a consistent coding style (gofmt).

If another language suits you better than use it, but to call Go "a regression from other modern programming languages" ignores the many reasons developers are using it.

[wwweston]

> The author says that "all the problems listed here have already been solved" by Rust and Haskell. Great, so let's stop complaining about Go and use those languages instead.

I applaud your advocacy. Using other languages is pretty much my personal plan.

The problem, though, is that like everybody else in the industry, I don't work in a vacuum. Other people may be making platform decisions for projects I work on.

Complaining about Go's limits seems like a good additional strategy to minimize the chance that I'll have to work around them again in the future.

[gendoikari]

I don't think the whole industry chooses its tools randomly. I think that in the long term, if a tool emerges from the dust it's because of some actual reasons. If the simplicity of Go will win against the complexity of Rust, for example, I think we should think about the reasons. In my opinion the problem it's not about Go limits, but instead is about our perspective as developers using our tools. We do really need complexity? We do really need oop everywhere? If the answer will turn out to be "no", I will need to change my attitude toward Go.

[wwweston]

> I don't think the whole industry chooses its tools randomly.

It may not choose entirely randomly, but that doesn't mean that it chooses reasonably. You mentioned OOP everywhere -- a philosophy that's driven several dominantly popular languages and has been seen as a mark of professionalism. If the industry is any guide, Go's break from the norm here already calls that decision into question.

(I happen to think this is one of several areas in which the industry is wrong, but then again I don't see the industry at large as particularly rational.)

> We do really need complexity?

No software developer wants complexity, every software developer is trying to manage and limit it to the extent of their resources.

The question is whether language simplicity leads to software simplicity.

It seems apparent Go's designers believe this is the case, and have offered a simple-ish language on a feature diet that avoids much in terms of type expressivity or facilities for abstraction that rise to the level of augmenting the language itself.

I think this can work for some problem domains, particularly one that is closely-fitted to built in types and libraries. But once your problem domain isn't close to native language facilities any more, you're forced to write more and more code to get around the limits of the language's expressivity. That ends up being more machinery and surface area to keep track of interactions between... which, in my experience, is where complexity creeps in rather than having to understand language features.

[gendoikari]

If rationality were a requirement for progress, progress wouldn't exist. The beautiful fact of evolutionary processes it's that rationality is not necessary. But I digress...

Needs change with time. In the current context, if Go is an improvement in some tech areas I think it will get some degree of success. Otherwise I think will decline after the first hype.

By the way, I agree with you about writing more code to overcome language limits. The hope here is that using idiomatic Go you will end up, no matter what, with a reasonably understandable code base, even for libraries and tools. It's a goal, I don't know if reachable or not.

[wyager]

> Great, so let's stop complaining about Go and use those languages instead.

That's not a very good attitude. Some people have to use Go (for work), so it doesn't make sense to just ignore them. If every language had the attitude "It's fine as it is, stop complaining", then languages would never improve!

[geodel]

I think this attitude is just fine because it does not make assumption about what is improvement for a particular language users which you seem to be making. Some user wants improvement ,ok fine, but then what about users whose experience deteriorate after those alleged improvements.