[brundolf]

Thanks for the references, I'll look at what the other side has to say

I am aware that fasterthanli.me can be a bit, shall we say... opinionated. Though as you say, his points do stand on their own. I can see the things he points out about the design philosophy of Go's language features and standard library and draw parallels to languages and libraries that I've used firsthand, and had firsthand frustrating experiences with when it came to navigating their magical behavior and lack of enforcement of contracts. But I'll keep an open-mind

[philosopher1234]

Certainly. As a counter-example to the pain of implicit functionality, take the UNIX file API. `open(1), write(1), close(2)...` represent hundreds of thousands of lines of code, spanning network devices, local file storage, integrity checking, and who knows what else, and all of it is hidden. It is precisely the mountainous heap of implicit behavior that gives these APIs value.

That being said, APIs with implicit function that are broken or surprising are painful, but I take this not as an indictment of implicit function, but as an indictment of buggy APIs. I think state and hidden functionality is the essential ingredient of highly useful code.