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Comment by collinf | Hacker News Reader

I think one thing that people get caught up in with Go as well is... well it's stupid easy to learn and work with.

I work for a giant enterprise company and the range of programming talent that we have is incredible. I know some people that couldn't code there way out of fizbuzz. Unfortunately, getting these folks onboard to learn the functional abstractions doesn't always sell (especially to the biz folks).

One of Go's biggest strengths is that anyone can pick up the language and be somewhat productive in it after a week.

My 2 cents in the bottomless well of programming language opinions.

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> One of Go's biggest strengths is that anyone can pick up the language and be somewhat productive in it after a week.

And then what? They find themselves duplicating the same code again and again because Go doesn’t provide good abstractions to reuse code. Or that they write a ton of code to do what could be achieved in a few lines in a reasonable language.

You learn the language in a week because there is not a lot to learn. Shell scripting is simple to learn as well, but nobody is building anything beyond short scripts using it.

An ideal language should allow the user to be a productive after a short time, but should have have enough power for advanced users as well.

One of the things I hate the most about Go is that source code generation is considered an acceptable solution to many problems. Perhaps I should go back to C — the preprocessor can be used to generate code as well as anything. In fact, the predecessor to C++ was a preprocessor used to generate C code that simulated C++ like behaviour.

>They find themselves duplicating the same code again and again because Go doesn’t provide good abstractions to reuse code. Or that they write a ton of code to do what could be achieved in a few lines in a reasonable language.

This.

>You learn the language in a week because there is not a lot to learn.

Exactly. For example, Brainfuck is even simpler and easier than go. It also produces even worse, unmaintainable, horrible code.

> One of Go's biggest strengths is that anyone can pick up the language and be somewhat productive in it after a week.

This ranks just about at the bottom for any language I care to work with.

"Learning a language" is more than just about being able to write syntactically-correct code. It's about understanding effective design patterns, idioms, the standard library, common pitfalls, writing maintainable code, and so on.

Learning the syntax comprises less than 5% of that effort, and optimizing for that step—particularly at the expense of the other steps—is ill-advised. And in my opinion, go has done precisely this by having tons of sharp edges: nil interface values, race conditions with channels, supposed-"meaningful" zero values, implicit interface implementation, etc. are all sharp edges I've personally run into that have caused bugs in production.

> One of Go's biggest strengths is that anyone can pick up the language and be somewhat productive in it after a week.

IME, that's basically the case with any language with suitable libraries in the application domain and that doesn't have radically unfamiliar syntax or programming paradigm, so this rings as praise for it being neither especially novel nor deficient in library support for it's target uses.

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