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by galaxyLogic 1423 days ago
That is also the reason I dislike languages like Perl and Groovy. They have too many ways of doing the same thing.

Web-design is another good example. There are typically so many ways of accomplishing something, that I actually don't spend much time thinking about it. But then later I found I could have done simpler and better with another approach.

2 comments

In terms of language design, absolutely.

Giving "free" choices to users just makes it more confusing. It's better to have one way of doing things than three that are kinda like the same but don't offer many advantages.

Optional for optional's sake doesn't help.

So what would you say then is “the Costco of programming languages”?
I would say Go.

I think when coding the only "decisions" to be made were whether to make things public or not, whether to use pointer receivers or not (even that wasn't usually a decision), and how to do error handling (no language is going to do that for you).

Go was at version 1.5 (2015) when my copy of The Go Programming language was release and there has been exactly ONE major language feature: Generics.

Here's from my Go notes on releases:

Releases: https://go.dev/doc/devel/release

(Since 1.5, my book's version) 1.9: type aliases, type T1 = T2 (Since 1.12, when I last learned Go) 1.13: number literals improved, godoc removed from core: go get golang.org/x/tools/cmd/godoc godoc 1.14: overlapping interfaces, https://tinyurl.com/2fcyrnqm 1.17: slice to array conv https://tinyurl.com/y3xvpwud 1.18: GENERICS