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by andriy_koval 103 days ago
> he popular languages (Python, Java, etc) can easily translate their idioms and data structures to Go, and the code would remain easy to read even without much Go experience

disagree, they made many decisions which are different from mainstream: OOP, syntax as examples.

1 comments

Sure, the syntax is unique, but it's fairly easy to get over that. I guess I'm comparing to Rust, where not only is syntax different, but data structures like a tree with parent references aren't as straightforward (nor idiomatic), and there's a lot more explicit methods that requires knowing which are important and which are just noise (e.g. unwrap, as_ref).

I would argue that after a short tutorial on basic syntax, it's easier for a Python/JavaScript programmer to understand Go code than Rust.

to me Rust syntax is less alienating, they adapted ML syntax which is probably second most popular(scala, typescript, kotlin) after C style syntax, while Go from whatever reasons got something totally new.
Which aspects of Rust syntax are adapted from ML? Semantics sure, but to me the syntax seems a lot more similar to C++ (e.g. semicolons, type parameters using <>, etc.)
mostly how you declare var + type, and function with parameters, which is probably majority of code boilerplate.