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by c_crank 1089 days ago
I don't think it would be so well regarded when considering the motivation that Rob Pike and Ken Thompson had for making the language the way they did.
1 comments

What was their motivation?
“The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt.”

Creating a tool that the constant stream of fresh out of college guys can't screw up with.

I see. And this is why there is no Maybe type, and an “unset” value is silently set to 0? Because fresh grads would find this easy to work with?
In general, the language lacks both complex features and low level primitives that would be useful for building anything more substantial than network glue code. Go codebases are often noted for the egregious use of copy and paste. Not that I can say that there's never a time and place for that, but it's not the kind of thing you'd be excited to work with. Give me the language Ken Thompson would solve problems in, not the language he gives his goons to solve problems in.