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Comment by grabcocque | Hacker News Reader

Isn't trying to hack a language to have the type system you wish it had, rather than simply using the language you wanted in the first place, something of a futile exercise?

If you want a language with ADTs and exhaustive patterns out there, there's plenty to choose from. Using a language with a weak type system and then trying to wish that fact away seems pointless.

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If you'd like to point us to a language exactly like Go in every way, except that it does have variant types built in, then by all means.

Excepting that, we all have to accept that languages have their pros and cons, and we are each responsible for weighing those pros and cons against our personal preferences and values.

Not everybody gets to choose the language they want to use at work unfortunately.

We get to choose, when there is freedom to choose to whom we work for.

Of course, changing jobs isn't always an option.

And someone can still love their job even if the language in common use isn't their personal preference.

That's the case for me at least. I was even involved in choosing Go at our company a few years back. A language doesn't need to be perfect in order to enjoy using it. :-)

The Haskell tax is high in my city as is the cost of living.

1. It's a bit difficult to change languages when you already wrote tens of thousands of lines of code for your project in one language.

2. Every language has its downsides. You can't mix and match features.

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