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by marc_from_ibg 1517 days ago
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7 comments

I don’t think this rant is toxic - there’s no personal attacks or rude words of any sort, and the tone is lighthearted - but it is all criticism. Maybe that’s enough to qualify it as toxic.

However, the author has real Go bonafides, he wrote many of these libraries: https://github.com/itchio?q=&type=all&language=go&sort=

I presume working on the above software burned some deep scars. Their switch from Go to Rust is motivated by this kind of issue.

(To be honest, I also stopped writing Go for fun because these kinds of paper cuts build up. I enjoy Go when writing stuff in its sweet spot - dealing mostly with network bytes in a server environment of my choosing. For me, venturing too far out of that domain is joyless, but not exactly painful.)

I don't think this article intends to give a full appraisal of Go. It highlights the downsides of a particular philosophical stance Go takes.

That stance is very much real, even if it's best described by gesturing at half a dozen examples. And it's nothing new, really. It's just Worse is Better all over again. I think it's instructive to see how it plays out in Go.

This rant is one-sided, but it doesn't pretend to be otherwise.

> toxic

The author presents things about the language that they don't like. How on earth is that "toxic?"

Have we reached the point where "toxicity" is just "things I don't like hearing?"

Yes. Can we go back now?
I disagree. I've used Golang just once and I got frustrated with a lot of things mentioned on this post and I don't even write Rust.
I am curious, please do send the fair evaluation, or the mistakes in this post if there are any.
Can you please elaborate on why you think it's toxic?
That's not what toxic means.

The article isn't in the slightest bit toxic.

Just because you disagree with it doesn't make it toxic.