[tuetuopay]

It's funny how I always hear the point about new hires for Go. My team is a Rust shop at $DAYJOB that I created basically from scratch, so I had to onboard every new hire on the codebase. It's amazing how confident they are due to the compiler having their back, and how confident I am their code won't blow up that much in prod.

> code is straightforward and easy to read

I have to disagree. I don't want to read 3 lines out of four that are exactly the same. I don't want to read the boilerplate. I don't want to read yet another abs or array_contains reimplementation. Yes it's technically easy to read, but the actual business logic is buried under so much noise that it really hinders my capacity to digest it.

> the compiler is blazing fast

much agreed, that is my #1 pain point in rust (but it's getting better!)

> and it's concurrency model is probably the most convenient I have ever seen

this so much. this is what I hate the most with go: it pioneered a concurrency model and made it available to the masses, but it has too many footguns imho. this is no surprise other languages picked channels as a first class citizen in their stdlib or core language.

> Go trades "being-modern" for amazing productivity.

I don't think those two are incompatible. If we take the specific point of the article, which is nil pointers, Go would only have to import the sum types concept to have Option and maybe Result as a bonus. Would this translate to a loss of productivity? I don't think so. (oh and sum types hardly are a modern concept)

Also, there may be a false sense of productivity. Go is verbose, and you write a lot. Sure if you spend most of your time typing then yes you are productive. But is it high-value productivity? Some more concise languages leave you more time to think about what you are writing and to write something correct. The feeling of productivity is not there because you are not actively writing code most of the time. IIRC plan9 makes heavy use of the mouse, and people feel less productive compared to a terminal because they are not actively typing. They are not active all the time.

[mcronce]

> Also, there may be a false sense of productivity. Go is verbose, and you write a lot. Sure if you spend most of your time typing then yes you are productive. But is it high-value productivity? Some more concise languages leave you more time to think about what you are writing and to write something correct. The feeling of productivity is not there because you are not actively writing code most of the time. IIRC plan9 makes heavy use of the mouse, and people feel less productive compared to a terminal because they are not actively typing. They are not active all the time.

This is my sense. "False sense of productivity" is an accurate statement - I've also found that it seems to be for a very specific (and not necessarily useful) definition of "productive", such as LOC per day.

It's not as bad as dynamic languages like Python, but very frequently Go codebases feel brittle, like any change I make might bring down the whole house of cards at runtime.

[insanitybit]

> It's funny how I always hear the point about new hires for Go. My team is a Rust shop at $DAYJOB that I created basically from scratch, so I had to onboard every new hire on the codebase. It's amazing how confident they are due to the compiler having their back, and how confident I am their code won't blow up that much in prod.

Same. Started a company, onboarded just about everyone to Rust. It went very well.

[usrbinbash]

>It's amazing how confident they are due to the compiler having their back, and how confident I am their code won't blow up that much in prod.

I get what you're saying, and I'm glad you are having such a good experience with it. Disclosure, I am not talking down to any language here...in fact I actually like Rust as a language, even though I don't use it professionally.

I am just saying that Go is incredibly easy to learn, and I don't think there are many people who disagree on this point, proponent of Go or not.

> I have to disagree.

We'll have to agree to disagree then :-) Yes, the code is verbose, but it's not really noise in my opinion. Noise is something like what happens in enterprise Java, where we have superfluous abstractions heaped ontop of one another. Noise doesn't add to the program. The verbose error handling of Go, and the fact that it leaves out a lot of magic from other languages doesn't make it noisy to me.

> I don't think those two are incompatible.

Neither do I, but that's the path Go has chosen. It may also have been poorly worded on my part. A better way of putting it: Go doesn't subscribe to the "add as much as possible" - mode of language development.

> But is it high-value productivity?

Writing the verbose parts of go, like error checking, isn't time consuming, because it's very simple...in fact, these days I leave a lot of that to the LLM integration of my editor :-)

Is is high value? Yes, I think so, because I don't measure productivity by number of lines of code, I measure it by features shipped, and issues solves. And that's where Go's ... how do I say this ... obviousness really puts the language into the spotlight for me.

[yesiamyourdad]

I honestly have started to wonder if the popularity of languages like Go and JavaScript are due to the lack of features in the base language. JavaScript in particular has had an incredible amount of effort invested in creating fairly limited, scattershot, and duplicative support for features that are "just part of the language" in Kotlin, or Rust, or even Java. It makes a really rich field for people who are interested in compilers, but did all this really make Uber a better company? Would all that effort have been better spent solving problems core to their business?

At my employer we have a pattern of promoting people who have done things like write a proprietary application gateway. The dev got a couple promotions and moved on to another company and we got stuck maintaining a proprietary application gateway with a terribly messy configuration and poor observability.

[Conscat]

> it pioneered a concurrency model and made it available to the masses

Isn't it basically just what Cilk did, but with fewer feaures?

[verletx64]

I think that it’s not just about something being possible with a tool, but people actually using it.

Go, for whatever reasons, has gotten people using it.