[mav3rick]

It is crippled admittedly by the authors themselves. The error checking pattern, no generics etc. are all to keep it "simple" yet are things most other programming languages have. Have you used Rust ? The borrow checker makes a lot of sense.

[jchw]

I feel like I shouldn’t have to answer this question, but Yes, of course I’ve used Rust. Why do you question this? I said nothing about Rust at all, other than that I like it, and whether Rust is good or not has little to do with Go being “crippled.”

But of course, Rust is not flawless. In fact up until recently it was kind of annoying, before non-lexical lifetimes became a part of the language. It’s also a very large and complex language compared to Go. This is not unilaterally a bad thing, but just as every line of code comes at a cost, so to does every language feature, and if enough language features fail to pay the rent your programming language will end up feeling bloated.

What Go lacks is exactly its strengths. If you criticize C for not having Java-style exceptions, people will look at you funny. There is some divide in the community over error handling but I defend that Go’s verbose and stupid error handling pattern is my favorite part of the language, and changed how I code inside and outside of Go. I also appreciate Go’s simple but effective patterns for composition-based object oriented programming, and for having a decent concurrency model (not that it is without flaws: the limitation of Go’s memory safety is definitely an issue here.)

Everything comes at a cost. The borrow checker brings immense promise for security, but that does not mean other approaches to memory safety or language design are suddenly obsolete. It’s more complicated than that, and I consider failure to understand this to be a sign that someone is not keeping an open mind.

[enraged_camel]

>>What Go lacks is exactly its strengths.

Surely you understand that this is a very self-serving attitude, though?

It's like someone points out that your car is crippled because it has a turning radius of 2 degrees and also has no brakes, and you go, "no but you see, what this car lacks is exactly its strengths! And it's those strengths that I enjoy the most when driving this car!"

[baby]

“Crippled” has a negative connotation. I’d say it is not crippled but kept self-contained without a multitude of overlapping features.