[NullSet]

I think this basically nails the attitude of every single go convert that I have spoken to. I am starting to get tired of hearing lines like "that lisp stuff is too complicated, I am a go programmer" or "why would you do x in y way, it's so much better in go".

I don't think I have ever seen such unrelenting fanboyism in a programming language. It very well may be a fantastic language but its not an end all be all, we would do well to remember that.

[masklinn]

> I don't think I have ever seen such unrelenting fanboyism in a programming language.

It's died down, but discussions involving C# used to be rough, take pretty much any PL feature added since 1.0 (generics, lambdas, local type inference, etc...) and any time they were suggested before their official blessing and addition by Microsoft would be met with charges of useless fancy-pants PL wankery of no use to Real Programmers in the Real World who were Very Productive and this was Abstract Useless Stuff for CS Undegrads Who Didn't Work In The Real World.

[blub]

Ruby and Javascript were (are?) pretty similar when it comes to fans. It's rather depressing to see how cultish programming is.

[k3n]

Hah, nice pseudonym.

I think it's mostly inevitable, to me it's no different than asking group of farmers which make of pickup or tractor is best, or a deliveryman which brand of shoes are best... I'm pretty sure you could come up with at least one analogue for most any vocation.

In programming, we have: language, practice (formatting, documentation, framework, etc.), methodology (testing, planning), development environment (integrated or otherwise), etc. and each of these is a lightning rod for disagreement. I think it just seems to be more prevalent for software engineers due to the fact that a majority of our discourse occurs online.

[mseepgood]

I'm a Go convert. And I have learned and understood the concepts of a lot of other programming languages before, including Haskell, Scala, Rust, C++, Scheme, Common Lisp, Smalltalk, Ruby, Python, Perl, PHP, Lua, JavaScript, Groovy, CoffeeScript, Dart, Java, C#, Objective C, C, Pascal, Basic. I understand higher-order functions, currying and sectioning, parametric polymorphism, monads (including the option/maybe monad), product and sum types, pattern matching, multiple dispatch, meta-programming etc. Yes, Go lacks most of these, it's a "dull", imperative programming language without parametric polymorphism or an ML-style type system (which is not "modern", btw, it's from the early 70s just like C) and with nil pointers. Nonetheless, Go is the most enjoyable programming language I've ever used. It strikes the right balance between features and their cost. I'm tired of being told that I'm just too stupid to see the light.