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Comment by eweise | Hacker News Reader

I get the feeling that Go programmers came from some other imperative language and got burned by some OO features. I feel kind of bad for them. I hope they never discover modern functional features or they will realize how much of their life was wasted writing pointless boilerplate.

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And I feel bad for those who pontificate over the lack of features for a language that’s easy to use, has a simple build system and allows for solving many classes of problems very easily.

Golang is popular for a reason. It is popular even among programmers that enjoy using other languages. No need to feel bad for programmers who are happily building things.

What you feel about what you don't understand, isn't really important to anyone else though.

Go provides less is more as a feature, but would be invisible unless the dev cared about seeking simplicity and performance.

Go is not simple (conceptually) by any strecth of imagination. Golang has pointers bolted on as if they are a real thing. Like, what's the point of exposing pointers without the pointer arithmetic when modern languages have come up with simpler ways to think about accessing memory? So, as a Go developer are you supposed to understand pointers or not? Similarly with Go routines, people boast about them as if they are a silver bullet for concurrent programming. But then, you also have and need to use sync primitives like mutexes sometimes. So, you still need to understand accessing shared mutable state and it's challenges well to use Go which is the actually complex part of concurrent programming. So, I don't know what people mean when they say Golang is simpler. I find it an ugly, weird and a hyped up language. The languages I consider simple are C and Python. C is simple because it's a small language and Python because it truly abstracts away the low level details. Golang is an opinionated (an quite an unimpressive) language with pros and cons like any other language. Currently, with more cons than pros, IMHO.

Go spec is quite short and understandable. The implementation handle quite alot for you, which is not simple, but makes many applications easy to write. Code is fast to write and easy to read. Golang really has 2 types of references, not pointers. I find C and Python slow and tedious to use, and would rather not share memory if I can avoid it, including using pointers (use map instead). It depends what one wants from a language, where golang fills a nice untraditional niche where experience and newcomers can meet. I find Go optimizes more concerns than any other language, which in turn makes it an opinionated balance of several dimensions.

The time spent writing boilerplate is completely negligible to the amount of time spent finding the "perfect" combination of language features to express your problem. I write production ready code in Go way faster than in any other language I've used.

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