Comment by smosher_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smosher_ | Hacker News Reader

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I think it's a canary. How many languages do you hear this said about? I've only heard it in regards to Go which is fairly pedestrian (read: looks and acts something like C / Java) as far as these things go.

More exotic languages, which take the uninitiated longer to acclimate to, don't seem to be trying to tell people they're not allowed to think deeper about and question the design of the language. Good criticisms of Go were made on day 1 and are being made to this day, Rob Pike's ego notwithstanding.

At the end of the day, if I see a problem with a developing language I am interested in, I'm going to report it. If I'm met with: "I don't know you but I'll assume you don't know what you're talking about" that's a second problem and I'm not about to double-down on it.

"I think it's a canary. How many languages do you hear this said about?"

In general, I see "This new language I'm learning sucks because it needs to work more like the language I know best" for all kinds of languages. "Python needs to use braces instead of indentation." "$X needs to handle errors more like $Y." (lots of things can be filled in there!) Complaints about the dynamic/optional/static typing in a language. "Haskell may be pretty but isolating IO effects like that is impractical, it ought to work more like most languages."

No, it's not even remotely isolated to Go.

FYI the quote above refers to the develeoper/community response to criticisms/ideas (eg. see the comment I replied to), not the criticisms/ideas offered by newcomers.

Is that really a general problem in the Go community?

I ask because I've seen people explaining the tradeoffs Go makes pretty clearly online without any rudeness or condescending attitude.

I don't know what it's like now. Rob Pike in particular made a lot of noise like this early on. There was a lot of parrotting of that, so it was hard to have a serious conversation. It seems like it's still getting play but I don't know how widespread that is today.

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