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Comment by smegel | Hacker News Reader

> Go has the nearly perfect balance of readability, expressibility and simplicity

Is Go really expressive?

It is pretty readable, but really non-functional too. Eg, they still don't have math.round and you wind up writing a lot of code because it can be a little bare bones or does things in a way that isn't quit usable.

I wouldn't say it is very expressive either. Go can be very wordy and verbose at times, and some things are downright a pain or poorly thought out (e.g, while Java has finally and C++/Rust have RIAA for dealing with resource deallocation Go has defer and it doesn't work really well when you encounter an error in the dealloc logic).

Simplicity is about Java 1.0. Give Go some time to add some technical debt before you get too excited about it simplicity.

It isn't a bad language. This is my second run thought the language, and I'm neither excited nor turned off by it.

... R-RIAA? You probably meant RAII right: http://www.riaa.com/

Resource management by litigation sounds innovative though

> It is pretty readable, but really non-functional too

There are projects starting to fix that: https://github.com/asteris-llc/gofpher

I think he meant non-functional in the sense of "not functioning", not functional programming. Neither of his immediately following complaints have anything to do with functional programming.

I was trying to be funny and missed the mark

Fairly verbose. But he was talking about the "balance".

How it is a balance if expressiveness suffers?

I guess the claim is that any more expressiveness would necessitate losses in readability or simplicity that the expressiveness doesn't make up for.

Personally, I think you're sense of relative value of those has to be pretty unusual to thinks it's "perfect". Though valuing simplicity above almost everything else is what's written on the tin with Go.

Not really. It's very verbose compared to Python, almost like Java.

Noo that's an overstatement.

Of course it's not as clean as Python, it's statically typed.

But type inference makes code way cleaner than your typical Java code (Javas type inference is improving, though).

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