[zemo]

the fact that you call Rob Pike "Erik Pike" really reads like the complaints of someone who doesn't do their homework and asks questions that have already been answered in many places.

Generics is a major tell, too, since the Go team's position on generics was always "generics are interesting but we don't know how to make them work well with Go's existing type system". See for example, this blog post from 2009: https://research.swtch.com/generic which references the FAQ answer to the generics problem here: https://golang.org/doc/faq#generics: "Generics are convenient but they come at a cost in complexity in the type system and run-time. We haven't yet found a design that gives value proportionate to the complexity, although we continue to think about it."

so I can see why people who have repeatedly answered the same question for years, only to have their answer misrepresented for years, to be annoyed when people who haven't read any prior discussion bring up a point that has been already talked about ad nauseam.

[treve]

Sorry about mis-remembering his name, but my point was a bit more nuanced. The frustration I had was not that certain features were missing, but I was met with a response that suggested that I was wrong for even wanting these features.

It was a comment on my personal experiences of interacting with the Go community, not the language and its limitations. My hope wasn't that Go implements my every pet peeve, my hope is that the community has gained some humility since I last dipped my toes in it.

Pike seems especially aggressive when interacting with people he disagrees with and this was for me indicative of the culture. It's been a few years though, so maybe by now I'm wrong!

Here's Pike on the topic of syntax highlighting:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang-nuts/hJHCAaiL0so/E2mQ...

[eikenberry]

I think you mis-linked there. The email message with the denigrating comment about people who like syntax highlighting is here...

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/golang-nuts/hJHCAaiL0s...

That was the day I dropped the mailing list.

[4ad]

I don't see anything denigrating there.

I disagree with Rob though, syntax highlighting is not juvenile, it's cargo cult programming.

[eikenberry]

"Syntax highlighting is juvenile."

That clearly implies anyone who uses syntax highlighting is juvenile. I'd say calling someone juvenile is meant to be denigrating.

[Merovius]

> Pike seems especially aggressive when interacting with people he disagrees with and this was for me indicative of the culture. It's been a few years though, so maybe by now I'm wrong!

FWIW, as much as I agree with Rob Pike on most things, I totally agree that he's abrasive and his way of phrasing things is often unhelpful (even though I think people also tend to read contempt into his brevity that isn't there). If it helps, I think he has realized that in the meantime and is largely staying out of public discussions for that reason.

[rwj]

The community has gotten better. Early discussions were frequently marred hype, and it was often impossible to cut through the noise. However, talks given by the authors usually impressed me by being fairly even-handed, and open about the trade-offs that were taken.

[platinumrad]

He's literally just making a joke riffing on 1 Corinthians 13:11.

[dragonwriter]

No, while he does reference that (just quoting it directly, not “riffing”), it's not just a joke, it's a reinforcement of his earlier dismissal, in the thread, of syntax highlighting as a “juvenile” practice parallel to colored rods used to teach arithmetic to young children, which grown ups should not need or use.

[almostdeadguy]

The kinds of parametric polymorphism implementations mentioned here do not represent the full set of options. Charitably this represents an ignorance on the part of the Go developers, but really it has felt like an apathy towards the field of programming language design and research. Intensional polymorphism (basically passing the type of a parametric argument as a parameter, and either using a specialized implementation of the function or one that operates over a boxed value) has been known about for years and is used in languages like Haskell: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/papers/intensional/popl95.pdf

[zemo]

That paper is mentioned in the comments of my first link. I would be surprised if the Go team doesn't know about it. In that thread, as well as here, both you and the other poster haven't actually stated how the paper's strategy would work for Go, and haven't actually stated how the strategy affects compile times, binary sizes, and execution time.

edit: addendum: but also, in every thread about Go, there are some Haskell people showing up to talk about how the Go team is too stupid to understand the Haskell type system. This happens regardless of what the opening topic is, which in this case, is dependency management. No matter what the topic is, if it's a thread about Go, you will find Haskell programmers there, condescendingly talking about how Haskell's type system is so much better than Go's type system. It is very tiring.