Comment by ZealousIdeal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ZealousIdeal | Hacker News Reader

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This is one of its biggest advantages to me as well. I have had to support many production systems, written in varieties of languages, over my tenure and in my experiences the systems that live the longest are those that are the most readable by new team members; people transition in and out and its important for them to learn quickly. And while a person's language experience matters to some degree, it is more the underlying domain that takes the most time. Languages that simplify on the number of solution patterns and focus on key ones being "idiomatic" helps to lower the mental load someone has to overcome to learning that domain. If you know C, Java, JS, etc. you can pretty quickly figure out how to read Go, and that matters.

Is Go perfect at this? No. I too would love to see some higher level functions exist for to help reduce boilerplate. For example, this proposal: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/45955 to add Filter, Map, etc. to slices. That seems like a practical set of functions to add to minimize boilerplate while at the same time not breaking away from simple idioms.

Once generics are released, anyone will be able to trivially write an Underscore or Lodash-like library providing filter, map, reduce, etc.

This is precisely what I’m afraid off. I don’t want library to become a mess of chained lodash style functions. The verbose style of writing your own loops is very readable

While generics will allow for such to occur, IMO if the "idiomatic style" is to only leverage it for specific patterns then it should not really hurt general readability for the most used frameworks/libraries. There will, of course, be some tradeoffs that authors will make, but overall I'm hoping it enhances readability, especially for the code my team and I write at least. Looking at the proposal, there is a lot of practical debate about naming, consistency with bytes methods, etc. and such honest debate keeps me optimistic.

> The verbose style of writing your own loops is very readable

That depends entirely on what style of programming you're most accustomed to. I've primarily written functional code the past several years, and even in that relatively short time, it's become for me in general easier to read chained/piped/composed function expressions than equivalent loops.

But sure, I can understand if you don't want that flexibility in Go. It's a fair position if you want the language to be confined to a certain imperative style of programming.

However, it's interesting to note that even if one can do loop-based imperative programming in Haskell and OCaml if one so desires, it's not idiomatic. Presumably, same would apply in Go.

When there's only one way to do it, everyone is or soon will be accustomed to it.

I'm not a fan, but it fits with google's goal when creating the language.

Agreed. I think that's probably one of Golang's strengths (and I've used it a bit professionally several years ago). I can understand if they want to keep it hyper-standardized.

For devs who want a more functional approach, there are a number of alternatives, including Rust (which is not a fully functional language, but has many aspects thereof).

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