Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by anonymousab 1980 days ago
Professionals with many years of experience could and would still make mistakes with C and C++. And many mistakes are very costly at Google's scale.

Wanting to make the situation better through a simpler, safer fit-for-purpose tool doesn't mean an industry is flawed anymore than the prevalence of sawstops means that carpentry is flawed.

4 comments

> a simpler, safer fit-for-purpose tool

Generics nothing more or less than a safety feature. Right now code that would use generics instead use the empty interface instead, which is effectively opting out of the type system entirely.

I'm personally ambivalent on whether go adds generics or not but framing a lack of generics as a safety feature is the most absurd thing I've heard today.

Wow came back to this and my grammar was horrible. Looks like I typed it out, edited, and failed to double check my edits...
Go makes concurrency easier (sorta) and eliminates some memory safety issues. But if you want a tool that helps you write more correct programs, you really need a much stronger type system than Go offers.
Holy spin. Rob Pike was explicitly talking about young inexperienced programmers who are 'not capable of understanding a brilliant language.' He wasn't talking about experienced developers and made that as clear as he possibly could. Go is made simple for novices, not safe for veterans.
You don't really get a choice when you decide you're going to write a project in a language. Senior devs will be required to work in the same language as the junior devs.
Go is not a particularly safe tool. It is a simple tool. That isn't the same thing. Sophisticated type systems are designed to improve safety at the expense of adding abstraction.