Go's main advantage, IMO, is that is both simple and opinionated to the extreme. It's a language that makes a lot of choices for you (from "no while loop" through "no exceptions" to where the brackets go formatting the file). Those choices might be the best choice or not, but the point is that they're already made and they're enforced.
The result is that in a big company, all projects made in go are very similar to each other in a lot of ways (much more than the average language) and so it is as easy as possible to have people contributing in each other's projects or moving between teams. There's no arcane syntax, no discussion about linters, nothing like that.
It's basically an amazing language to make programmers interchangeable. Whether that's good or not is a different discussion, but at the very least it looks that it's gonna make it very attractive for employers and so be a highly demanded skill in the near future.
This is very weak argument. Once these restrictions are embedded in language, it cannot be removed by anyone. On the other hand, same thing can be accomplished by using company-wise style enforcers. If you think that is harder, I'd say forcing every project in big company to use same language is even more harder.
My main quip with Go is that its rather more of the same but more poorly done in the name of minimalism. Extreme minimalism is as bad as extreme richness. The entire art of language design is achieving just the right balance for a specific audience and set of goals.
But "company wide linters" do carry over to other companies and projects. For Go its already set up, you dont have to think about it. Otherwise youll have a week (or more) discussion for every single quirk in the language and how one would format that and try to apply this to a group of people.
I'd call them more like working standards. Imagine having to discuss how to make a brick wall everytime you need to make one. Things like having a masonry cord (which can equal to a "gutter", line length restriction) and the mixture of the cement, are critical for execution in a team of more than 1 person, and not following standards will make a hacked up job.
> On the other hand, same thing can be accomplished by using company-wise style enforcers
But you can't do that with open-source libraries. When I use an open source library, I can audit its code very easily, and this is not always true with other languages. The more complex the language, the harder it is to audit it. There are many C++ open source libraries (hello Boost) I can't understand because they don't use the dialects I'm used to.
To answer the question: what would a language look like if you put it's designers in a time capsule for 20+ years and had them make a language that was uninformed by all the language advances and learnings they'd missed out on.
This doesn’t answer the question at all. Also it’s very disingenuous. The designers of Go were very much aware of the the last 20 years of language development. They decided on a subset that catered to software engineering between teams of people spanning a length of time.
It purposefully leaves out lots of features and cutting edge design philosophies because many Of those make things difficult when sharing code between multiple developers Spread over a long length of time.
Go’s philosophy has always been close to KISS. Don’t provide all these cutting edge tricks and tips because you can accomplish the same thing in a far clearer and maintainable way by doing it simpler.
This is the story I keep being told, but it doesn't seem to match with the reality of a language. Two example off the top of my head:
Loop variables are captured by "reference", not by value, so it's very easy to create bugs where you capture accidentally capture the wrong thing and don't have the value you'd expect.
Nulls, the billion dollar mistake. Most languages are quickly moving away from nulls (and pointers for that matter), or creating constructs that make them much safer (such as what typescript is doing). Instead go doubles down on both of these. In the last decade of programming in kernel level c, python, ruby, c++, java, typescript, scala I've never worked with code that crashes so much and is as buggy as go.
Both of these problems could have been addressed fairly easily without bloating the language. Google has people on the c++ committee; it very much feels like the creators of go had too much hubris to walk down the hall or across the campus and kindly ask a good language designer to shoot holes in their design.
Another example is "iota". How does that make code sharing easy at scale? Any time I see iota, I have to start manually counting lines, and remember the rules for if blank lines or comments bump the counter, and it completely circumvents the ability to quickly grep for a value seen in a log message. It is completely antithetical to teams of people and spans of time and whatnot. It seems more like a team of three people who randomly had ideas and ran with them without thinking the consequences through very well, or consulting the wisdom of others.
That "billion dollar mistakes" is an excellent marketing expression (nobody wants to make billion-dollar mistakes! We should avoid that null they talk about! It looks so expensive!) but I don't know how actually true it is. Do we have any kind of scientific paper that proves languages without null lead to way less expensive software than languages with null?
I'm not talking about memory unsafe languages like C or C++, but situations where, in a memory-safe language, a null pointer exception in production happened to cost a shitload of money.
I'm pretty sure I never had a nil dereferencing in production with my go code. Invalid array access, off-by-one-errors, yeah, sure, way too many, but very few languages can prevent them at compile time. But nil dereferencing? I can't remember that.
Kotlin is one example where it's difficult to make that mistake. Kotlin does provide nullable type and everything can check at compile time and it so good. So if write code in pure kotlin (java interop has null issues) you can avoid null pointer errors. It's really good.
I totally agree it's great and tend to enjoy languages that don't provide the user with unchecked nulls. It's a cool tool, but I don't think it's worth a billion dollars. If I had to choose, I'd rather take non-mutability by default rather than compile-time enforced checking of null pointers.
I'd read some post where Go designers boasted about how they simplified compiler code by cutting down a language feature. It seemed to me they were obsessed about keeping compiler simple which resulted in half-assed language that was then re-casted as achievement in minimalism. I've felt that Go is optimized for compiler designers as opposed to actual developers.
As a Go programmer myself, the syntax of Go is simple yet effective. You are in control of what should be done, and Go will make sure all edgecases are covered in _defined_ behaviour like a managed language would. In C, reading out of bounds is legal (except when the address is not accesdible). In Go, you will get a panic (that you can still catch, but its pointing out an invalid program state).
But how noteworthy is that? I'm sure programmers coming from C will appreciate it, but well-definedness is kind of… the bare minimum you'd expect from a modern language, especially a fairly high-level one like Go.
I dunno, I feel like Go was created to commoditize the work of programmers. Make everyone write the same stupid and repetitive code, over and over again. No one will ever be able to fuck it up, and no one will ever do anything interesting with it. You can onboard new hires who don't know the language in literally an hour. When reading the code, everyone will understand what each line does but there will be so many lines in the codebase that most people won't actually have time to understand the entire project (which is probably how the managers prefer it, actually). The performance will be pretty okay, since the language isn't high level enough to not be aware of the performance of the code you're writing. Great for companies with a gazillion coders. Like Google.
Programming in Go is like trying to tie your shoes with one hand. You can do it, and its okay (I guess), but you can always see how things could be so much easier.
Maybe this is a bit much, but I find Go offensive: designed for the maximum amount of typing and least amount of thinking. Even Java looks like a powerful language in comparison.
I think certain decisions, like ditching inheritance, were very much informed by the last 20 years of language 'advances'.
They certainly got some things wrong (null for example, and errors aren't great, generic collections would be nice), but it's quite interesting just how much they left out while making a very usable (IMO) language.
I don't want advances and progress in a programming language, I want it to get out of the way and let me think.
Painting in very broad strokes here: If you are coming from C, because you're willing to trade a little bit of speed and footprint to no longer deal with malloc and free. If you're coming from a higher-level, dynamic language, because you're willing to give up some dynamism in order to gain speed and possibly concurrency.
Same reason you learn any language. If you have zero interest in learning Go, why did you click or comment on this link? If you’re genuinely interested in what Go programming is like, the Go website has a Tour that is concise and well made.
It’s downvoted because it’s being facetious. If you actually want to learn about what Go programming is like or used for, go to the Go website and try the tour.
Go's main advantage, IMO, is that is both simple and opinionated to the extreme. It's a language that makes a lot of choices for you (from "no while loop" through "no exceptions" to where the brackets go formatting the file). Those choices might be the best choice or not, but the point is that they're already made and they're enforced.
The result is that in a big company, all projects made in go are very similar to each other in a lot of ways (much more than the average language) and so it is as easy as possible to have people contributing in each other's projects or moving between teams. There's no arcane syntax, no discussion about linters, nothing like that.
It's basically an amazing language to make programmers interchangeable. Whether that's good or not is a different discussion, but at the very least it looks that it's gonna make it very attractive for employers and so be a highly demanded skill in the near future.