Hacker News Reader

Comment by mordocai | Hacker News Reader

While I agree all of this is subjective, I would argue that something being composed of "deliberate decisions to enforce a certain set of design contracts" doesn't mean those decisions nor the design contracts are good. Nor does it automagically make a good implementation.

In addition, making bad design decisions that you think are good is actually one of the best types of evidence for incompetence (though not neglect, in this case).

I don't personally have enough data to have a strong opinion on where Go channels falls here, but I don't think any of your arguments here have any bearing on the idea that Go's channel implementation is bad.

View on HN

But using something in the way it was not intended to be used, and then complaining that it works badly, is evidence of incompetence on the part of the user, not the designer.

> I don't personally have enough data to have a strong opinion on where Go channels falls here, but I don't think any of your arguments here have any bearing on the idea that Go's channel implementation is bad.

If sagichmal is correct, zeeboo is trying to use channels in a way that they were explicitly not designed to be used. That makes zeeboo's criticism very likely to be invalid. (It is the one who uses them as they were designed to be used who knows what the actual problems with the design are.)

My criticism is that the design limits the places where they are valid. I'm not trying to use a hammer where a screwdriver is required, I'm saying that if the hammer was designed differently, we'd be able to use it in more situations appropriately.

It's as if someone created a gun that fired backwards and I said "hey, it might be better if the gun fired forwards. we'd be able to use it in more situations." and people responded with "you shouldn't use a gun that fires backwards if you want to fire forwards." I totally agree, but it's missing the point.

That's where the purely subjective argument comes in I suppose.

The argument could be made that go's channels SHOULD be able to handle zeeboo's use case and the fact that they weren't designed to be able to handle it makes them bad.

Only if go doesn't have a good way of handling that use case (even if it is something completely different from channels). I don't know enough to know whether it does.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com