Comment by MetaCosm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MetaCosm | Hacker News Reader

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It is opinionated (a more useful word than pretentious), and it is this way across many things. From style to directory structure to versioning of dependencies to generics. If you actually read the reasoning behind them, I think they are rather well defended by very smart people, but to each their own.

If you really have an issue with some of the very opinionated ideas that come to a large degree bundled with Go, that is fair. That is great even! It probably isn't a good fit for you. Which is fine, there are hundreds of other programming languages that work for you, most are the wild west.

For certain people (like myself) the sanity of Go is striking -- each decision is made for unremarkable and straightforward defensible reasons... a lot of them are community driven over personal preference... it is better for the herd (think: herd immunity) if everyone uses one style and everyone uses one layout... etc. It isn't about being "right" or "needed" by every person, it is about being consistent so you can move from project to project and focus on learning the code, not layout or style, just what the code does.

Go was designed from inside Google, with large teams in mind with many projects.

>It is opinionated (a more useful word than pretentious), and it is this way across many things.

Well, opinionated doesn't mean much quality wise. Either you have the right opinions or the wrong ones. If you have the wrong opinions on something AND are opinionated about it, then you're stupid.

You make some good points, and I agree with most of them. The thing that troubles me is that Go seems like an exellent language for the most part. I really like it. That being said, it's unfortunate that in order to use it, I feel like some basic choices that I've come to expect as a programmer are taken from me.

Lots of things that are good for communities are restricting for individuals. Even more interesting, some of them lose significant value when anything less than a super-majority fall in line with them (This for example is why I think the Go community sometimes is very "passionate" about getting people on the right path, they are threatening the herd immunity of sane code and layout... one person goes off, others see their example and copy it... chaos!). I think the Go team was wise enough to see that the value of having sane baked in standards from day one FAR outweighed the complaints they knew would follow.

I think many people put too little value on communal norms, they have substantial value and are worth the adaption time. When in Windows C++ -- follow the conventions, when in Linux C -- again, follow the conventions -- and when in Go -- do that same. Fighting the dominant style for established platforms and languages is a mostly pointless, exhausting and sometimes debilitating task generally only done by those too inexperienced to realize how ridiculous it is. Team leads more experienced tend to just choose whatever is the dominate style / layout (preferably per-written up) for that platform/language realizing the benefits for getting ease of reading, consistency, hiring, firing, flexible labor (consultants) and most importantly not having absolutely worthless debates about style and layout.

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