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by stouset 1903 days ago
Frankly your dismissal of people's legitimate concerns with the language as just uneducated griping by fools is one of the reasons I and so many others avoid it and its community like the plague.

I don't know what it is about go, but for some reason it seems impossible to have reasoned—if passionate—disagreement about the language. Any criticisms are hand-waved away as just ranting. Everyone who actually uses it knows that none of these things are real problems. And... what are those real problems, anyway? Can't think of any!

I love Rust, but I'm more than happy to dive into its warts and agree with legitimate complaints and concerns. Hell, I love Ruby too and that language is full of questionable decisions. Not only are language designers imperfect, but there's no such thing as a perfect language anyway. Great decisions have downsides, and there's no sense in acting like those downsides don't exist.

Why is it that gophers never seem to be willing to admit that their language—like all others—has warts, bad tradeoffs, good tradeoffs with uncomfortable but acceptable downsides, and flat-out mistakes? To any criticism, the response is the same: "you don't understand the design", "go's simplicity is its strength", "I've never needed that feature", etc. Hell, the inventor of `nil` calls it his billion-dollar mistake and someone is in this wider discussion arguing that nil pointer dereferences aren't that big a deal.

Where on earth are the gophers that will stand up and say, "Yeah, <X> part of golang sucks. I'd change <Y, Z> if I could. But I still really think it hits the right balance overall." Instead, it's all just regurgitation of the same Kool-Aid.

1 comments

I’m happy to acknowledge real trade offs made by go. Error handling in go makes writing code harder. This thread is very hostile to go, so it makes sense that my comments express similar hostility.
> This thread is very hostile to go

It's a programming language, it'll be OK.

Sure, but I like Go a lot and am going to defend it, particularly from what I see as baseless or misinformed accusations (that quickly veer into resentment and ad hominem).
Don’t, it’s not a good look.
I’m still going to lol. Bad look or not.