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Comment by el_bhs | Hacker News Reader

@dvt, this is the OP here.

I was hoping that those who already agree with me about dynamic languages would come to understand that Go is different in this respect. I did a lousy (i.e., nonexistent) job making a case to those who don't agree with me [yet! :)] about dynamic languages, though.

I will write a followup post later this week about the long-term maintenance problems associated with languages in the python/ruby/javascript family. I don't think they're "bad" (I was known to advocate for python in certain situations when I was at Google), but they're often inappropriate, and it is my sense that many developers haven't had the requisite large-dynamic-language-project trauma yet to understand that from firsthand experience. (The toughest part about those traumas is that they happen so late in a project's lifecycle that there's no quick way back to safety...)

So I will try to make that case in a future post. Thanks for your thoughts.

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Dynamic languages work out great when code coverage is ~100% at every run, and runs are short.

Virtually all programs start out that way, so dynamic languages feel great.

As they grow, the pain creeps in very slowly. As you said, by the time the programmer realizes he's in hell, it's too late to fix it.

Exactly. With proper discipline and true 100% test coverage, dynamic languages work well. But over time, that ideal is a challenge for most software organizations to actually live by. Or that's been my experience... it's one of those theory vs. practice situations.

> by the time the programmer realizes he's in hell, it's too late to fix it.

From what I've seen, it's more that management doesn't want to take resources from fighting fires to move some gasoline. A disciplined group can even take rat's nest code and whip it into shape: but only if management is clueful enough to make that a priority. Usually, they're making decisions on a short-term basis.

Maybe you'll convince the rest of us! If you do write another blog post, try to include the recent indie nightmare that was purportedly caused by Go[1]. I think it's relevant here (since we're discussing large projects, after all).

[1]http://forums.thedailywtf.com/forums/t/27755.aspx -- it was also on HN but I'm too lazy to dig out the thread.

Ah, I hadn't seen that, thanks!

For what it's worth, "Go" as a language is not really implicated in that, it's more like the `go` cmdline suite that was causing trouble. I would also contend that the devs were being foolish to do what they did... Assuming everything was in a git repo, the toolchain makes proper use of submodules, and to my mind this sounds like a case of developers fundamentally misunderstanding git, not Go per se.

But my "railing on Rails" (and, to a lesser extend, Node, Django, etc) will not focus on Go... it's more of a general critique about the lifecycle of large software projects written in dynamic languages.

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