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Comment by andrejewski | Hacker News Reader

I am completely in support of Haskell and functional languages in general. There are some gaps in Go and definitely some glaring problems. But this comparison also only lists the bad. Go is good for what it was intended for which is concurrent programming and server/web application.

Just a note: I don't think it is fair to say Go has absolutely no immutability as it was defined, it does have "const". See http://golang.org/ref/spec#Constant_expressions

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>Go is good for what it was intended for which is concurrent programming and server/web application.

I absolutely agree that Go is nice for writing web servers! However, there is no reason that it can't still be nice for that and also a well-designed language in general.

For example, Haskell has awesome concurrency features, and writing a web server in Haskell is reasonably nice (not quite as nice as in Go, IMO).

`const` is for compile-time constants where something like `let` in Rust can be used for values generated on the fly. The latter is immensely more powerful and actually provides the described benefits like guaranteeing that data is not changing under your feet.

Edit: While `const PI = 3.1415…` is threadsafe, it's not very useful in comparison to runtime-immutability :)

Yes, the guarantees provided by true immutability are not met by "const". I wrote the note loosely using the author's expectations and advantages of immutability, not the exact definition. But thank you for letting me clarify.

Also I just noticed with Go's Unicode support we can write `const π = 3.14..` if we really wanted.

Yeah, this post seems to be most about general purpose language features, and not so much about stuff that is relevant to the niche Go is trying to carve for itself.

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