from Hacker News

Attention, Spoiled SWEs: Take a Lesson from Go

by hondo77 on 9/24/24, 9:50 PM with 4 comments

• by __MatrixMan__ on 9/25/24, 2:19 AM

  I had to switch to go at work recently. I'm having a difficult time with it. I keep listening for what it might teach me, but it has nothing to say, and since it has nothing to say, I can't anticipate its direction. All of its design decisions seem arbitrary because I can't figure out what its goals are.

  Maybe I'll wake up tomorrow and the light will shine down on me and I'll understand. But from where I'm sitting right now, the lesson go has for us is:

  > Look around, the hell you see... that's about as good as it gets. There's no point in trying to find a better way, so here's the best way to not bother trying.

  The author seems to think that the aspirations of more interesting languages are vanities of some sort. Like they're saying "look at me I'm <buzzword>!". But if you study the way people from different language communities behave... it would seem that whatever the buzzword is, it's actually having a significant affect on how they think and how much they enjoy coding. I don't know why you'd withdraw from that.

• by erik_seaberg on 9/25/24, 2:44 AM

  > A move only the reigning search engine king would dare.

  It was a reskin of Limbo, which they had released at Bell Labs without a lot of traction.

  > Most new languages never overcome basic performance issues.

  Poor performance is a problem with an implementation. Poor expressiveness is a problem with the grammar and semantics of every implementation, especially when you don't let end users extend the language to their needs.