[Lewisham]

Bad programmers are always going to be bad programmers, no matter what their age. Bad programmers are inflexible and unadaptable; unable to keep up with new languages or idioms. Ken Thompson is about as old school as they come and he wrote much of Go.

[airless_bar]

I think dismissing anything invented after 1960/not invented at Google counts as "inflexible and unadaptable; unable to keep up with new languages or idioms".

[weberc2]

Many folks come to Go from "modern" languages, Python and Java in particular. I don't think this can be considered "dismissing".

[airless_bar]

I don't think anyone considers Python or Java modern.

Nevertheless, this isn't about where adoption comes from, it's about how the language design was influenced by the advancements in language design in the last 40 years.

[weberc2]

> I don't think anyone considers Python or Java modern.

This is why I put "modern" in quotes; these languages are "modern" relative to the 1960s-era languages.

> Nevertheless, this isn't about where adoption comes from, it's about how the language design was influenced by the advancements in language design in the last 40 years.

Precisely. The OP implied that Go programmers are "bad programmers" because they can't adapt to post-1960s languages. I countered his hypothesis by pointing out that the lion's share of Go developers were previously competent Python, Ruby, JavaScript, or Java developers. If his hypothesis were correct, one would expect the Go community to be primarily C expats.

For whatever reason, a large swath of developers find the features Go adds to be more useful than the "advancements" Go omits (or perhaps they just find value in the omission of those "advancements" altogether). At any rate, Go's popularity can't be reasonably attributed to graybeard developers who can't grok Java.