[welder]

> func main() {

> animals := []Animal{Dog{}, Cat{}, Llama{}, JavaProgrammer{}}

> for _, animal := range animals {

> fmt.Println(animal.Speak())

> }

> }

This makes my eyes hurt. In this modern age we still haven't learned to create easy to read languages?

[krat0sprakhar]

Not sure I understand - what part of this is not easy to read? It's quite familiar to read and make sense to any programmer who's had experience with any of the C-like languages.

[jkubicek]

Is this sarcasm? That code snippet doesn't look like any C-like language that I'm familiar with.

[ejcx]

I think the syntax is terse mostly for the sake of example.

There's a lot going on in about 3 lines.

[ThatGeoGuy]

I don't think "terse" quite describes it. Python can be terse, as you can say:

    n = sum(x for x in my_sequence if x % 2 == 0)

But the Go code listed above is not just plagued with a lot going on in "3 lines". I think there's something to be said about gratuitous operators, and a sort of beauty to letting the parser do more work than the programmer themselves. I don't use Go at all, but from the example above I can tell it is a horribly grotesque language considering when it was created. Sure, even C or C++ have curly braces and array specifiers for types; however, at least these have the excuse of age and compatibility to work with. Go is relatively new, and I think that welder was getting at is that syntax shouldn't be some overly complex thing in this day and age. Nim and Elixir come to mind as two (newer) languages that avoid many syntax warts without making significant trade-offs because of it.

[laumars]

> I don't use Go at all, but from the example above I can tell it is a horribly grotesque language...

If you don't us Go at all then you can't tell anything from a single 3 line example. It's like judging an entire Linux distro based solely on a couple of screenshots.

What the he'll is going wrong with HN lately that I can't open a programming thread without superficial criticisms from someone who's never actually coded in that particular language, and troll posts about how Java / whatever is better / already supports feature x.....

People complain about the zealous attitudes of language fanboys, but honestly I think the dogmatic negativity on HN is becoming a far greater issue.

</rant>

[icholy]

Everyone's a PL expert.

[incepted]

And Python itself is pretty verbose compared to modern languages:

    mySequence.filter { it % 2 == 0 }.sum()

[squiguy7]

This is a very contrived example to illustrate what an interface is in Go. You will almost likely never see code written like that in a good project.

[incepted]

On top of that, the code above ignores errors, something that Go makes all too easy by not supporting exceptions.

[thwarted]

This is an extremely contrived critique.

The only place an error could occur in this code is if fmt.Println returns an error. What should happen if you can't display the output? Try to print an error? This is entirely appropriate for demo code and use of stdout like this. No one honors the return value from printf(3) in demo code either. Considering other languages, Python's print functionality doesn't have anything about returning or raising errors, and it wasn't even available as a function until 2.6.