[mseebach]

The argument is roughly that it is, in fact, not very useful, while opening up a vast array of misuses - especially in the domain of being all too clever. What does "+" mean on a list and an object? Add, probably. But what if it's two lists? Union? Or add the second list as the last element to the first? Named functions "add" and "union" aren't any less readable and loads more descriptive.

The only situation you positively need operator overloading is when doing arithmetic, and you should do that using the built in types. This, of course, sucks when the built in types are inadequate, and you e.g. want to use a arbitrary precision library such as BigDecimal in Java.

This, of course, is an opinion, and I'm not shy to admit it's been shaped by being burned by Lift, the Scala web framework which makes heavy use of symbolic function names which makes it incredibly difficult to talk about or search for answers online.

[Lewisham]

Of course, Go itself is completely unsearchable, so you always have to search for Golang, which means that thee mut be hundreds of pages that get missed.

[mseepgood]

And "C" or "D" are searchable? Or "Java" (island, coffee) or "C#" (musical scale)? Or "Basic" (fundamental)? Or "Python" (snake) or "Ruby" (gemstone)? Or "Lisp" (speech impediment)? Or "Pascal" (French mathematician, SI unit and general given name)? Or "Smalltalk" (informal conversation)? Or "Logo" (emblem)? Or "Lua" (Portuguese word for moon)? ...

[lalmalang]

In my humble opinion, in the vast majority of cases, yes. Because " C ", " D ", " C# " should be easier for search engines to disambiguate (at least working with Lucene, it is, and I imagine Google etc are similar-ish).

As for Java, Python the context in the page likely to point to its intended audience (and it helps they have been around for ages etc). Otoh, " go " is likely to be used in a lot of literature, including other programming related texts.

Try searching for something with clojure, and then try go -- the quality of results is usually substantially different, and my unsubstantiated hunch is that not all of it has to do with lack of go-related content.

Seems to be getting better though..

[weaksauce]

I would think that the search algorithms are smart enough to conflate references to go in an article about programming with golang as a search query. I am not a google engineer but I do know that they have very good "did you mean" analysis on search queries.

[numeromancer]

Maybe they should have named it “gox”. Then you would just have to filter out the Dr Seuss references.

[dschobel]

Doesn't ruby with its "operators are actually methods and fair-game for redefinition" implementation disprove the theory operator overloading is an a priori Bad Idea (tm)?

Those guys seem to manage the flexibility pretty well.

[mnutt]

In my experience, ruby's '+' doesn't get redefined all that often. The most-redefined operators I've seen are '[]' and '<<'.

I think it works because people don't usually just go around wantonly pushing objects onto each other. It's usually part of a DSL that's used deliberately. Some of the craziest I've seen were things like _why's Hpricot library, which made a sort of xpath-like DSL:

    doc / :div / ".foo"

If I saw it out of context I'd assume it was some sort of pseudocode.