[stouset]

We care that time and time again, when anyone ever brings up a criticism of the language, they’re told that everything is just fine and it’s not a problem and we just don’t get the Go Philosophy. There’s not a problem, stop trying to make Go like every other language, and changing things would make the language more complicated and worse.

Then when the language is inevitably changed for the better, resolving the complaint, suddenly it was always going to happen and it was just a matter of getting the details right.

Every other language community I can think of is more than willing to acknowledge the shortcomings of their language. “Yeah, this kind of sucks in principle but it’s not something that gets in the way in practice” is a fine perspective. So is “this was a tradeoff; we went in this direction and these are the resulting downsides”. But the golang community practically trips over themselves to constantly argue that obvious shortcomings in the language are actually a good thing and we just don’t get it.

Nobody is saying the language shouldn’t improve. We’ve all been begging the language to improve. But we’re also tired of the constant, obvious, and shameless gaslighting from the community whenever things do get better. You aren’t going to like the comparison, but it’s extremely Trumpian.

[jamesfinlayson]

Yeah, I worked with a guy in the late 2010s - one of the most painful people I've ever worked with - who would tell anyone that would listen that Go (as it was in 2018) was the perfect programming language - it had all the features you'd ever need - no more, no less. It doesn't need generics, the package management story is fine etc. Thankfully he's been out of my life for a long time now but I believe he's still writing Go, and I bet that he's telling anyone that will listen that Go (as it is in 2026) is the perfect programming language and that its implementation of generics was necessary and perfect etc.

He wasn't the only one but he certainly took it to the extreme.

[piekvorst]

This is an outlier. The Go team and community never endorsed that. In fact, their position has always been the opposite. To give just one example, see [1].

[1]: https://research.swtch.com/dogma

[stouset]

I think it’s pretty clear this post was a response to the clear dogma within the community.

> But we need help from everyone. Remember that none of the decisions in Go are infallible; they’re just our best attempts at the time we made them, not wisdom received on stone tablets.