[cultureswitch]

I don't think your example is very compelling but I completely agree with your general point.

I read the Go book by Donovan and Kernighan and I have been working full-time in Go for the last year (my work is otherwise interesting so this is tolerable). It is painfully obvious that the authors are stuck in 1986 in terms of language design. Go is C with modernized tooling (in some ways it's worse...).

It's a horrible idea that has been extremely well executed. And the idea is essentially to make a language as easy as possible for people with imperative language brain damage to learn, make it as simple as possible and then make it simpler than that.

A good example is that despite taking almost everything verbatim from C, the authors decided that the ability to specify that some variable is read-only (i.e. `const`) is "not useful", so one of the few redeeming qualities of C is simply absent from Go.

[cle]

Go does have const: https://go.dev/tour/basics/15

[geodel]

> people with imperative language brain damage to learn, ..

Perhaps this attitude is why function languages are not as popular as they could be.