Hacker News Reader

Comment by hardwaregeek | Hacker News Reader

Not even Java. The entirety of programming language development. Go is a language written by very good software developers but very bad language designers. It's an entire language of "why don't you just..." statements. Errors? Why don't you just return a value? Generics? Why don't you just use duck typing? Packages? Why don't you just use vendoring?

In some cases these statements have some merit, but, as in most cases, they demonstrate that the authors didn't really do their homework before making a language. Or they willfully ignored all of these issues. I don't know which is worse.

View on HN

> Generics?

Go does have generics, though.

> Why don't you just use duck typing?

Go doesn't have duck typing. It has structural typing, which is not duck typing. Duck typing is dynamic typing (at runtime), structural typing is static (at compile time).

> Packages?

Go does have packages.

> Why don't you just use vendoring?

In Go it's recommended to use versioned modules, not vendoring.

It has generics now. It took them a solid 10 years to get it. Packaging took them what, 8 years? They had that ridiculous GOROOT stuff for the longest time. And interfaces are basically duck typed.

Go interfaces are not ducked typed.

So the inventors and maintainers of V8 and C are very bad language designers? I don't like either of those languages but those are aome pretty strong words.

Did any V8 people work on Go? And V8 is an implementation of an existing language, so that fits under "very good software engineer, very bad language designer". As for C, well, it's not a fantastic language. Not to mention, it's been 50 years since C was created, ignoring those 50 years of progress to build essentially C with GC is pretty poor language design.

Robert Griesemer worked on V8 and Ken Thompson invented C. V8 is obviously not a language, but it is a massive project to make it as obscenely fast as it is and used in as many places, which should give Griesemer some credibility. I personally don't like C, but everything is obvious in hindsight and it's used everywhere, so you gotta give some credit to Thompson as well.

I'm struggling to understand the context of this comment. What do the inventors of V8 and C have to do with this topic?

> Go is a language written by very good software developers but very bad language designers

That's exactly why I love it so much

Reply on news.ycombinator.com