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Comment by codeslave3422 | Hacker News Reader

"My take is that Go is a great language when you're working with incompetent people. It's so limiting in the abstractions you can build with it, that it is very difficult to write code that is not immediately obvious in its purpose."

Do you think this is intentional? Similar to how java is incredibly restrictive, and thus great for corporate programming environments?

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“The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt.”

-- Rob Pike

this philosophy really shines when my golang compile time is super fast - especially compared to say c++ which is just an abomination

Yet Turbo Pascal for MS-DOS, with more features than Go has currently, did already have faster compile times on those clunky 8086 CPUs, let alone on modern 21st century hardware.

Fast compilation times in Go are only a surprise for a generation that never used native programming languages with native support for modules.

As for C++ compilation times, yes they are an abomination when doing make world from scratch, including third party dependencies, with heavy template code.

However modules are around the corner and they were just voted into C++20.

>Fast compilation times in Go are only a surprise for a generation that never used native programming languages with native support for modules.

This.

There are many other languages that are far, fat better (in the overall sense) than go, with very fast compile times too.

Which did you have in mind?

OCaml compiles faster, than Go, at least without flambda optimization layer.

https://pl-rants.net/posts/haskell-vs-go-vs-ocaml-vs/

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