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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

A lot of is more in what was taken away rather than what was added.

As someone who is occasionally accused of being too pro-Go on HN... I actually have no problems thinking of Go as a really nice and refined 1990s language. Another type of "Java done right". (I say "another" because I think C# has a really good claim to that as well, albeit in a very different direction.) There's a place for that in the world. As much as I love the cutting edge of programming languages too, I'm not sure that we're anywhere near as far along on knowing how to build really big systems with them as a lot of people think we are. (There's only one way to get there though, and I absolutely encourage people to keep trying.)

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> A lot of is more in what was taken away rather than what was added.

Given the fact that C is basically the blueprint for Go, I'm not sure what things were taken away from C, syntactically speaking. It's more like Go added garbage collection to C, and a few other bells and whistles and told people : "this is 21th century programming", without actually thinking about what C got wrong at first place.

"I'm not sure what things were taken away from C, syntactically speaking."

Pointer arithmetic. Go has "pointers" but they're really more references. Some other things depend on how you look at them; Go "removes" manual memory management from the language by adding GC, it "removes" the fact that in C values are essentially untyped and very easy to penetrate down to that untyped layer by making all values carry their type around regardless, they "remove" the limitations on function pointers to provide real closures, they "remove" trivial array overflow by adding checked access, there's a lot of rough edges removed from C at the language level even if it required "adding" some runtime support.

I mean, by the time you've removed pointer arithmetic and manual memory management, you are by no stretch of the imagination in C anymore.

What mistakes does Go copy from C?

Getting popular despite being not an "objectively" better language.

"A really nice and refined 1990s language" really is a perfect description of Go (and also explains why some people love it with a passion, while others can't understand what all the fuss is about).

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