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Comment by _y5hn | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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