Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gothrowaway 3382 days ago
Golang irritates people for various reasons. For some reason I've begun to feel the language is was partly designed to put prima donnas who push theoretical languages in blogs all day rather than ship in their place.

These Haskell and Scala people talk talk talk all about correctness and syntax tricks. Meanwhile golang is nimble and just winning every race. I wish they'd learn from it rather than get so defensive.

Also, it's just a confirmation people get too attached to complicated features in languages as a crutch. YAGNI

Programming can be straight-forward and clear. Without it spiraling into a contest of clever tricks. You look clever when you get product out the door.

I've been programming 10 years professionally, and 15 years as a hobby. I've yet to hear what a sum type is until yesterday.

I got nothing wrong with people dabbling and hacking on the weekend, but sometimes it irks me when people split hairs over being "correct" and never actually get stuff done.

I think a lot of the "syntax tricks" is a mechanism used by people to feel superior. It's like, "hey if I can't actually build something useful, at least I can blog about how to write a monad transformer".

I'm not trying to be offensive, I'm just failing to see the value in this and trying to make sense of what I'm seeing. Where was the business issue that could only be solved through sum types in the language syntax? Enlighten me.

2 comments

In our code, we have a closed interface type with many variants, not unlike an AST. We frequently add new variants to that interface. It is nice to have a tool tell us which parts of the code need updating to account for the new variant. This tool does that. It trivially reduces bugs and saves development time.

If you think people like me "don't get stuff done," then please, take a stroll through my Github. ;-)

Speaking from my own experience, I don't have the opportunity to use them, rather I have to use the language with less features in the work place. The articles are meant to persuade people into using languages with more features. I feel at home with FP, HKT, and ADTs, actually I'm out of my comfort zone without them.