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by nine_k 3143 days ago
Apparently, the project leaders see it as a lower-priority (though not unimportant) issue. Looking at the adoption figures, they seem to be right.

I personally stay away from Go due to lack of generics and other expressiveness issues. People who have to work with it write code generators on top of the compiler, because the compiler team won't include it into the language. (I can see how it's not an easy thing to do; Russ Cox wrote a nice piece about it.)

Java prior to version 5 had the very same problem. It was wildly popular nevertheless. It took Java 8 years to gain support for generics, though, about as long as it took Go to not yet obtain them. (By that time, Java was widely considered the Cobol of 21st century; I think Go must be successfully stealing that crown now.)
1 comments
pjmlp 3143 days ago
> Looking at the adoption figures, they seem to be right.

Not really, for me Go is a bit like JavaScript.

I have to deal with Go thanks to Docker and K8s, doesn't mean I would use it when given the option.

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nine_k 3143 days ago
Would you rather have them use C++? In this regard, Go is a lesser evil.
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pjmlp 3143 days ago
Yes, as long as it was modern C++, not C compiled with C++ compiler.

Or any modern natively compiled language.

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hackerfromthefu 3141 days ago
That's kind of part of the problem - with C++, or Java, or C#, you can write in 15 different styles, syntactically valid but quite possibly unreadable to another programmer who is experienced in the language. That's because there isn't one idiomatic standard for the code, there's 15++, and the language has the complexity that enabled that mess.

If you want to work in a kitchen sink language (and I often do haha), just use one of the many available.

But perhaps you're missing the value of simplicity? It is after all the main strength of Go, and a rare commodity in software engineering these days.

Overall I think it's a shame to have less choice, and we lose something by making all languages too similar (in both features, and at the meta level in complexity).

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dansouzaio 3143 days ago
Or Rust, if you really really want to avoid C++.
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