[rowanseymour]

It's fantastic concise language and standard library steered by people who are determined to keep it simple and intuitive... which IMO makes it all the more odd that it has this obvious foot gun trap where `!= nil` doesn't always mean what you might think.

[amw-zero]

The “simplicity” of Go is just virtue signaling. It has gotchas like that all over the language, because it’s not actually simple.

[LandR]

Yep.

The lack of features means all the complexity is offloaded to the programmer. Where other languages can take some of the complexity burden off the programmer.

Go isn't simple, it's basic.

[amelius]

Perhaps Go is a nice target language for a transpiler, so you could still benefit from the runtime and ecosystem while fixing the bugs in the language itself. Anyone working on this?

[bobbylarrybobby]

https://github.com/borgo-lang/borgo

[laumars]

As someone who's written commercial software in well over a dozen different languages for nearly 40 years, I completely disagree.

Go has its warts for sure. But saying the simplicity of Go is "just virtue signaling" is so far beyond ignorant that I can only conclude this opinion of yours is nothing more than the typical pseudo-religious biases that lesser experienced developers smugly cling to.

Go has one of the easiest tool chains to get started. There's no esconfig, virtualenv and other bullshit to deal with. You don't need a dozen `use` headers just to define the runtime version nor trust your luck with a thousand dependencies that are impossible to realistically audit because nobody bothered to bundle a useful standard library with it. You don't have multi-page indecipherable template errors, 50 different ways to accomplish the same simple problem nor arguments about what subset of the language is allowed to be used when reviewing pull requests. There isn't undefined behaviour nor subtle incompatibilities between different runtime implementations causing fragmentation of the language.

The problem with Go is that it is boring and that's boring for developers. But it's also the reason why it is simple.

So it's not virtue signaling at all. It's not flawless and it's definitely boring. But that doesn't mean it isn't also simple.

Edit: In case anyone accuses me of being a fanboy, I'm not. I much preferred the ALGOL lineage of languages to the B lineage. I definitely don't like a lot of the recent additions to Go, particularly around range iteration. But that's my personal preference.

[bobbylarrybobby]

You are comparing Go to Python, JS, and C++, arguably the three most complex languages to build. (JS isn't actually hard, but there are a lot of seemingly arbitrary decisions that have to be made before you can begin.) There are languages out there that are easy to build, have a reasonable std lib, and don't offload the complexity of the world onto the programmer.

[laumars]

> You are comparing Go to Python, JS, and C++, arguably the three most complex languages to build.

No, I'm comparing to more than a dozen different languages that I've used commercially. And there were direct references there to Perl, Java, Pascal, procedural SQL, and many, many others too.

> There are languages out there that are easy to build, have a reasonable std lib

Sure. And the existence of them doesn't mean Go isn't also simple.

> and don't offload the complexity of the world onto the programmer.

I disagree. Every language makes tradeoffs, and those tradeoffs always end up being complexities that the programmer has to negotiate. This is something I've seen, without exception, in my 40 years of language agnosticism and part-time language designer.

[ignoramous]

> because it’s not actually simple

Cue Rich Hickey's Simple made Easy: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/SxdOUGdseq4 / https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/SxdOUGdseq4