[mrbrowning]

For what it's worth, I don't particularly have a cross to bear with respect to Java. I cited it just because its invocations as a Bad Language bogeyman are common in the Go-focused writings I've found, and those are far out of proportion to its inherent flaws (of which I believe there are many!). I completely agree that it's a matter of preference, which I think is supported by the fact that I found Go to be the best choice of language in the context that I'm operating in whatever my reservations.

I'm confused about your assertion that the Java ecosystem has a similar problem, though, because my sense is both that it has a much less identifiable orthodoxy by virtue of being so widely used across so many domains, and that the new guard, such as it is, is very much in favor of creating libraries and utilities that favor simpler implementations and interfaces contra its "architecture astronaut" baggage.

[xyzzy_plugh]

You make a fair point; I'm not adequately exposed to the Java ecosystem, I mostly end up reading Apache projects.

I guess my remarks could be rearranged as: In general, I find Java, and the JVM friend Scala, to worship Abstraction over simplicity. Complexity is constantly confused for convenience, and that makes me sad. The number of files I need to read to understand _any_ piece of Go, I could likely count on one hand, if even. For the JVM-based approach: dozens, if not more.

Abstractions _in theory_ are great: they reduce the cognitive burden, they simplify behavior, make it easier to rationalize and cast judgement; But in practice, that just isn't true. You _always_ need to peel away the abstraction.

In Go, countless times, I've found myself reading the standard library implementation. Is this good? No, of course not. Ideally, as a consumer, I never need to look under the curtain. Things should just work. But that tends to never be true, and looking under the curtain is an important aspect of computing (c. 1970-1999) that permeates everything we do.

Go makes it really easy to look under the hood, see what's happening, and more-or-less instantly achieve clarity. The only other languages I've ever used that came close were C and C++, and history has demonstrated how well that's worked out.

[geodel]

To add to your point last week I cleaned up a part of project in Java sprawling in 30 or so files with 5 KLOC to 2 Java files and under 1 KLOC of Java code. Now main clean up was using library properly which was already present as dependency for years and removing innumerable level of indirections.

This code was written in really roundabout way in Java tradition where e.g. setName() would call getName() -> initName() -> initClassName() -> getDefaultClassName() -> initDefaultClassName() just to set one damn string value. And believe me this getName() function would get called grand total of one time in whole project.

And it was possible for me to do so because learning and writing Go made me confident that straightforward code is not a sign of junior/inexperienced developer. Because in Java it will be exactly that if you do not bury the actual logic in ten levels of abstract crap.