[kubb]

I’ve been using Go at a large software company for 4 years. It does the job, my biggest complaints are the low capacity for abstraction, verbosity and ergonomic pain points. It can do certain things well, but in a large enough project you’ll inevitably find that it doesn’t give you the best tools for certain types of problems.

I don’t know what to think about the upcoming generics. It feels late to make such a big change so long after the language has been established. At least a plan for it should have been integrated into the language from the start.

It feels like a missed opportunity - an effort with similar funding but a more sound theoretical foundation than being Newsqueak 3.0 could have become an industry game changer. Instead it fills a niche, which is a success, albeit smaller.

[vp8989]

"It feels like a missed opportunity"

I agree with that. I think looking back on it, Go arrived on to the scene at a perfect time where lots of people were rearchitecting so there was lots of natural appetite in the industry for a new language. Go vacuumed up a lot of this opportunity but ultimately hasn't really evolved the practice of software engineering all that much.

[erik_seaberg]

> feels late to make such a big change

This is recoverable. The Java world was also saddled with a decade of awful pre-generic code, but we burned almost all of it to the ground and started over.

[int_19h]

The need to tackle generics later resulted in design decisions such as type erasure, which even today are still limiting the evolution of Java.

[erik_seaberg]

Yeah, that was an unforced error. Fundamental changes to a language can and should rely on upgrading deployed runtime libraries.

[zozbot234]

> an effort with similar funding but a more sound theoretical foundation than being Newsqueak 3.0 could have become an industry game changer.

That's a pretty good description of Rust 0.x. Might ring a bell.