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Comment by sapek | Hacker News Reader

Whether you like Go or not depends on whether you think of software development as engineering or as craft.

This got downvoted but I think there's more truth here than on much of the rest of the thread, though I might use words other than "engineering" and "craft". I'm fond of saying that Golang isn't a particularly great programming language, but is one of the great programming tools.

> I'm fond of saying that Golang isn't a particularly great programming language, but is one of the great programming tools.

Could you elaborate on what you mean here? Why do you not consider Go a language? What do you consider the requirements to be a programming language?

The way I read it, he meant that Go is not a great language. Go is "boring" as a language. However, it actually is a great programming tool. Great as defined by how long it takes to write module X, how well module X performs, how many bugs are in X, and how easy it is for a different programmer to come along and work on X later. In a real sense, the very design that makes Go boring is responsible for the good things.

This is an awesome point. I feel like programmers using Go care less about the language and more about the process of creating and maintaining a product.

I really dislike this description, which you see often in golang discussions because it implies either the people that prefer other languages are dilletantes focused on the wrong things, or the people who like golang are too stupid to use a more elegant language AND do product development.

I don't think either is true. What I do think is true is that every language makes trade offs and golang makes me less productive with it's choices & restrictions. I'm reserving judgement about how it impacts my teams aggregate productivity.

More like "... whether you've used any more modern languages than C" (such as ML and many other functional and research languages).

I have used SML, OCaml, Haskell, and many other languages, and I like Go, and use it for almost anything I do these days. So your statement is false. The only thing I did like more in functional languages was writing compilers (which ironically happens to be what I'm doing now in Go).

I didn't carry out a scientific study -- to my knowledge, no one is bringing any hard facts to the table when they talk about programming language preferences -- so you can't evaluate what I said as logically true or false.

For reference, I have used OCaml, Haskell, Golang and C extensively. I think Golang is a wasted opportunity to replace C. It's a mediocre language with a bunch of annoyances.

What kind of compiler are you writing? For which language and target?

For Go and sparc64, I did arm64 before.

You did the work to compile Go to arm64? Thanks for that then!

Yes I did, welcome!

I like how ML is more modern than C, but they were both released in the early 70s.

Indeed, ML was more advanced at the time of release, and has been improved since. However I won't blame C, since C was much more successful and (as Javascript knows well) it's very much harder to make changes to a language when you have to maintain backwards compatibility with a vast body of code used in production.

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