[kasey_junk]

So by that definition of magic, something like ranging over a channel is magic?

It looks like a simple for each loop, just like over a slice or map, but under the covers involves locking semantics.

If so, I guess I'll buy that definition of magic, I'm not sure thats any different than knowing what the language does.

[gentoo]

In go, there are a minimal amount of primitives (like channels, slices) to learn. Once you know them, they're fairly intuitive.

In C#, properties can be arbitrarily complex. You can't just know how properties "work" and then do mental shorthand on them. Every time you look at a new codebase you might have to dig through several files to find out what one line does.

[kasey_junk]

But the "magic" in this case is that properties can be methods. Once you know that how is it any different than methods?

In go methods can be arbitrarily complex. You can't know how they work without digging through several files to find what one line does.

Another example of magic in go would be method names. You have no idea if it is safe to change the name of a method because it could be satisfying an interface far away from the definition site (or in the case of exported methods nowhere you have access to).

We could go back and forth all day about what is and is not magic, but it still just seems like "language differences" to me. If the claim is "go does a lot less for you than other languages, so has a lot less opportunity for magic", I could probably concede that.

[fauigerzigerk]

>But the "magic" in this case is that properties can be methods. Once you know that how is it any different than methods?

It's different because you have to apply that general knowledge in every single case when reading code that you are not familiar with.

In Go or Java, the information on whether a.x is a constant time variable access or a function call of arbitrary complexity is available at the call site. You don't have to look it up. It's one less thing to do when reading code.

And when you do have to look up what an expression means, how straightforward is it? Consider this expression:

  f(x)

In Go f(x) means whatever the function f does, and f is exactly one function in the current package.

f(x) in C++ (and to a slightly lesser degree in Java, C# or Swift) is one of a set of functions called f. Knowing which one actually gets called requires knowledge of tens of pages of name lookup rules plus knowledge of possibly large swaths of the codebase.

It is often claimed that languages more powerful than Go just have a steeper learning curve. But it's not true. Even if you know all the name lookup rules of your favorite language (do you?), you still have to apply them every single time you read unfamiliar code.

In my view it's pretty simple. If you have to read a lot of unfamiliar code all the time then Go is great. If you can know both a more powerful language and your codebase inside out, then Go will be frustrating for its lack of abstraction features.

[nuggien]

> Another example of magic in go would be method names. You have no idea if it is safe to change the name of a method because it could be satisfying an interface far away from the definition site (or in the case of exported methods nowhere you have access to).

Is this true? If you changed the name of a method, it will no longer satisfy that interface and your code would not compile.