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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of languages that can make that claim, and lots of developers that would pick up a new C-like language in a week or so. The challenge is that companies that picked Go or $uncommon_language need to provide the space and training opportunity.

Go may be easy to learn, but mastering it is a thing on its own, just like the other languages.

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Go's spec is much smaller than most mainstream languages. Seriously, it's a weekend read to understand the entire language specification (and it's actually readable)

Mastering a language is not the same as reading the entire spec, or even internalizing that spec. Scheme or Forth or Io are all probably smaller than Go. Perhaps even smalltalk is (the Smalltalk 80 spec is larger, but contains some of the library, tutorials, examples, and the entire spec for compiler and the VM).

If you really want an extreme example language with the tiniest spec, you can always take Brainfuck. The entire spec probably fits in a few paragraphs, but it's not easy to master.

My comment mentioned mainstream languages. To my knowledge, Brainfuck is not a mainstream language used at any small, medium, or large corporation.

The point about the spec was the language is small enough to master.

Scheme (Lisps in general) is different because it is homoionic. Forth is not mainstream, and neither is it's paradigm. And well, I never heard of Io so I will check it out, looks neat.

And your point was refuted. Brainfuck not being mainstream is irrelevant; either a short language spec correlates with speed and easiness of mastery or it doesn't. And the counter-evidence shows that it doesn't.

You can't just casually ignore inconvenient exceptions to your beliefs. I mean, you can, but it's not something that reflects positively.

The go board game has an extraordinarily simple rule set. On the other hand, it is an exceedingly difficult game to gain proficiency in.

A simple spec does not equate to a simple language. I would argue the opposite: a simple spec often means a large amount of hard work is punted on and left to the end-user.

Like it's numeric tower?

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