[packetlost]

That's because Go is intentionally clunky and awkward in the name of "simplicity". IMO it's charming to some degree, but it's far from perfect and I think you'd need some pretty serious threats to get me to describe it as "elegant" in any way.

Rust somehow has more elegance than Go, if only in small parts. Nothing compares to Scheme in the elegance category IMO :)

[mst]

My view of Go went from being annoyed to "they picked their tradeoffs carefully and consciously and then leaned into them hard to squeeze every ounce of upside out of them" and while it's still not really my preferred aesthetic I now have a lot of respect for the design as a design process.

Meanwhile, getting addicted to scheme many years ago is a lot of why I still mostly write perl, I need 'my' (i.e. expression/block level scoping and you actually have to declare your variables to scope them before use) and closures for the style of programming I like to do.

Rules out python, ruby, and pre-ES6 JS, though JS with 'let' and arrow functions is pretty survivable and will be even more so if the 'do' and 'match' proposals land.

(note: I know go has :=, and while I'm ambivalent about the syntax, the semantics are pretty much what I expect; the above was talking about scripting class languages though hence not mentioning it there)

[packetlost]

Despite what I may have made it seem, I actually quite like Go as a language, I just wouldn't call it elegant or pretty (though certainly not as ugly as some other languages out there), but it's very pragmatic.

It's been a long time since I've written any Perl, but I can say I don't care for it as much as I do Lisps in general.

[mst]

Many people don't care for it, and I made peace with that many moons ago; personally, I'm quite fond of what I'd call 'applications perl', which at least when I write it tends to be a mixture of OO and function composition type code with as much of the state as possible pushed to the outer edge (plus async for I/O if applicable), etc.

It barely feels like the same language as sysadmin scripts are written in, it just happens to share a compiler and a VM.

... and it doesn't exactly even share syntax since perl supports libraries defining their own keywords, e.g. while I won't be surprised if somebody makes it a feature of the VM eventually, our async/await is currently provided by https://metacpan.org/pod/Future::AsyncAwait and as you can see at https://metacpan.org/pod/Future::AsyncAwait#WITH-OTHER-MODUL... there's quite a few other useful ones out there.

Of course, many people complain vociferously about the idea that you have to use *libraries* to get syntax, but as somebody who still loves scheme I regard the ability to build the language up towards the problem to that extent to be a feature.

My first ever cpan release was making continuations pass back out to perl as a subroutine reference from Guile so I could write linear top level logic in scheme and use continuation capturing to sit that atop an event driven I/O stack - axisofeval.blogspot.com's lispx (https://github.com/lispx/lispx/) provides an fexpr based lisp that does similar for JS.

(trying to think of a good example of perl code of mine that shows an example of this is annoying me because I don't have any public code right now that's new enough for me to not have already decided I don't like it anymore ;)

[eru]

Scheme (and by Scheme, I mean Racket, I guess) is nice, but it's not particularly elegant compared to eg Haskell.