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Comment by simfoo | Hacker News Reader

Same here. For me it was primarily the syntax. So many people think that syntax is something you get used to, but I don't. Syntax matters a lot for me, and the way Go does it just isn't compatible with my brain.

Regular grammars are great for parsers. But really, having an easy to read (conceptually!) language is way more important imho.

But call me crazy when I say that I like C++ and can read it effortlessly :)

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Well of course you get used to it, like you did get used to C++ (unless you were born that way which I doubt).

It just takes time, you don't want to spend that time getting used to Go and that's perfectly understandable.

"you'll get used to it" is a bad measure of usability.

But so is "I am already used to it," and so how do you find an objective, non-biased, measure of what is usable?

I can get used to something and still dislike it.. with Go it's mostly the bracket style, or put differently, the inability to turn off automatic addition of semicolons before parsing. I'd actually rather "have to" put semicolons manually, but no, I have to suffer so others don't have to put an additional line into their style guide.

Yeah I completely agree. Though I think when you really get used to a language and understand it deeper, you tend to understand the trade-offs that were made, if the language is well designed. Then you can still think that the trade-off don't match your requirements.

C++ is definitely something to behold in terms of syntax. It's hard to justify much of the type-system syntax (meta-templates, `sizeof...(Args)`, and `std::forward<Args>(args)...` come to mind). I'm picking on argument-packs here and ignoring the beauty of initializer-lists, operator-overloading and user-defined literals (which allow great syntax in user-code but their own syntax is haunting in library-code). I doubt that C++ would look the same if the syntax were created from scratch with the current set of features.

So it's fair to say Go's syntax is unfortunately limited in expressiveness (and I too find myself mystified by how to express ideas neatly with go), but I have a hard time imagining C++ is something worth emulating without adding a whole bunch of subjective caveats to what "should" be avoided.

If you like c++ then you just haven't given Go enough time to sink in.

It reads more left to right then right left like c++.

I've given go plenty of time to sink in, and I still prefer c++. Things like not allowing implicit type conversions on things that clearly are not a problem (int16->int32) are just annoying.

Call me crazy but deep inside I'm a toaster.

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