[Dewie]

> These languages whisper in our ears "you are brilliant and here's a blank canvas where you can design the most perfect abstraction the world has ever seen."

They also tell me "now you don't have to wait for the language designers or compiler writers in order to 'implement another feature'." Not that _I_ would necessarily be this "brilliant" guy that implements these features. Most likely I will just find some third party library that does it.

[oscargrouch]

The problem is when you have to maintain your code with millions of lines, and hundreds of abstractions.. those "features" will hunt you in your nightmares at night

This is the "The Curse of C++" and some languages pointed in the article while beautiful and correct at first sight are going down in the same road..

Do we use a programming language to look smart, to create correct code or to efficiently solve problems in a maintanable and sane way?

Go is pragmatic.. theres nothing wrong with that.. but i agree that adding some features to it would not hurt either (like generics and enums) :)

[jerf]

To understand a language, one must know what problem it was designed to solve. It isn't always obvious, or what it initially looks like it was designed to solve, or even what the community thinks it was designed to solve.

Erlang, for instance, isn't about concurrency. It's about reliability.

Go, I think, is also not about concurrency. It's about building a language that can be sanely used by reasonably large groups of people of varying levels of skill, yet still produce fairly good software even so, without the language forcing a complexity explosion to deal with it.

Consequently, this does not appeal to a lot of relatively skilled programmers used to programming alone. It isn't my personal pick of favorite language, for instance. However, if I could push a button for free, I would convert my workplace of a couple hundred developers to it in a heartbeat, whereas I probably wouldn't actually do that with my favorite language. It is not, of course, a magical fountain of code quality, but it would give me the best tools and best foundation to clean up code bases that in all the other candidate languages I know are one or another sort of mess.

If I were starting a new startup right now and Go were even remotely appropriate, I'd use it. But in my hobby projects? Not really. Except maybe to smash out a microwebsite, it's pretty good there.

So, you know, a lot of the question is what exactly are you looking for in a language? I like Haskell, but the idea of even proposing to change a project at work to it is laughable... and this is important... nor would I expect to enjoy the result two years later if I won. The mess of code that would result from people hitting Haskell with a stick until it did what they wanted it to do would be an unstoppable torrent of ill-conceived code. On the other hand, Go would almost certainly produce much cleaner code, because that's where it really shines. Maybe it isn't "good", but it's the best choice right now in a lot of places.

(It's interesting to contrast Go's approach to this problem with the other major language to tackle this problem space, Java. Despite attacking the same problem, the approaches are significantly different, and I think Go's way better. I'd hesitate to actively predict this, but Java could definitely be feeling some heat from Go in three to six years in a way that very few languages have actually managed to provide any challenge to Java in a long time.)

[oscargrouch]

I have the same line of thinking as you do.. is the difference in use something you like and can work, and choose something you can use in a bigger group..

HN crowd are top smart.. things like Rust and Haskell are a breeze for people here.. but this is not the reality of the tech field.. the majority of people i know in tech, cant handle more powerful languages.. its too much for them

In the end is just that.. know how to choose the right tool for the job.. and dont do it with your ego..

Adaptation is really important.. and in your thoughts we can see a lot of that..

In Wonderland people may have the IQ to spend for the extra concepts and power a language may provide.. but experience is antagonic to this dream..

The cool thing of smart people to make complex things more simple, is that much more people are able to follow.. is the democratization of computing.. this is in total odds against the elitism we can see in some tech circles.. and im totally against it..

[illumen]

Rust and Haskell are made to reduce the amount of problems you have.

I've seen newbie programmers learn Haskell as a first language in under a term. So I don't believe the marketing from the Google people that their language is worse because it is simpler.

Choosing something because marketing told you it was easier is just as silly as choosing something because of ego. Calling people egoists when they choose a tool because of reasoned arguments based on evidence is simply anti-intellectual, and rude.

[jerf]

"I've seen newbie programmers learn Haskell as a first language in under a term."

Even as a fan of Haskell, I have to say that if you spent one term on Haskell and one term on Go, the latter students are going to be far closer to a place where you could drop them into a real job and get real work out of them. (That said, as I sit here and look back on what "one term" really constitutes, it's not much, regardless of language.)

[oscargrouch]

> Choosing something because marketing told you it was easier is just as silly as choosing something because of ego. Calling people egoists when they choose a tool because of reasoned arguments based on evidence is simply anti-intellectual, and rude.

I Just dont know where in the post i did say something like that.. marketing? egoists? where did i said that?

If you happen to be above average in say english language for instance.. and you know a lot of words and sentences, poems.. but the thing is.. if you choose the speak in the english you know better, you will communicate with fewer people.. or you can just jump to a lower level to communicate so everybody can understand..

Of course you can use the advanced english with elite people.. you can teach people the 'better english' but a lot of them wont care, because they care about other things.. and i dont blame them.. (they may be worried about math or trips)

My point was just something like that.. nothing more, nothing less

[stcredzero]

If you happen to be above average in say english language for instance.. and you know a lot of words and sentences, poems.. but the thing is.. if you choose the speak in the english you know better, you will communicate with fewer people.. or you can just jump to a lower level to communicate so everybody can understand..

Intended side effect of irony?