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Comment by abc_lisper | Hacker News Reader

> Go: Go is utter shit that only survives due to the devs name-dropping "Google" every 5 minutes

Woah!

Go is great if you dont mind writing 1000's of lines of boiler plate code one would expect to exist.

Agreed, but that said I'm a recent convert from Scala to Go. Not sure I'd go backwards (no pun intended), boilerplate aside.

Having standardization on things like channels in the language makes for a much nicer consistency in the language. Scala has 8000 ways to do anything, half of which involve an exotic DSL. I'll take plain and simple please over esoteric and unmaintainable.

'plain and simple' languages encourage and often necessitate 'esoteric and unmaintainable' applications. Look at Java for examples of this, and Go is basically java without generics and a much worse garbage collector.

How so? You can find examples of poor engineering in any language. What's specific about go?

Go doesn't have the facilities that let you handle real-world concerns in a nice way. All the examples of bad, enterprisey Java - Spring AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean, XML config for everything, reflection-based JSON serialization, annotation-based transaction management, JavaSpaces - they weren't written by idiots, they were written because they were the best way to solve real business problems within the limits of the language - limits that go also has.

People don't like writing hundreds of lines of repetitive boilerplate the way go's lack of generics forces you to. They'll look for a better way, and they'll come up with hacks, just as they did in Java.

Well Java has generics since 2004 and I have seen bloated enterprisey usage and patterns increasing vastly since then. Spring has become major force after Java had generics. So your argument about generics does not sound realistic to me.

Java's type system is limited (no higher kinds) and methods that might throw exceptions can't be handled as values in a generic way.

Be fair now, you don't need to write them, you just copy/paste them.

Not sure if you meant that in jest, but it made me shudder a little.

Clearly people either love or hate Go. There is a lot of hate I've seen on HN. I personally love it, but who am I to say what is a good language and what isn't.

Honestly I'd expect to see the most Go hate on a thread about scala. The design principals of both languages are completely at ends with each other.

Clearly people have opinions that range across a wide spectrum on any subject.

To say interest in is divided into either hate or love is disingenuous.

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