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Comment by PopsiclePete | Hacker News Reader

Go is a language that is a bit tedious to write, no doubt about that, but it's very easy to read. I spend a lot of my time reading other people's code and I really appreciate that.

The fact that Scala as a language allows something like SBT to not only be created, but accepted, means I don't want anything to do with it.

I've suffered long from the Ruby ecosystem's mentality of "look at what I can do!" of self-serving pointless DSL's and frameworks and solemnly swore to myself to stay away from cute languages that encourage bored devs to get "creative".

It's about trade-offs, I guess. Go definitely appeals to a lot of people, and not all of us are unaware of the amazing "progress" that has been made in the 80's and 90's. Awesome progress that brought us Java, SOAP, C++, Javascript-on-the-server, and a slew of other tech some of us want to stay far, far away from.

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> Go is a language that is a bit tedious to write, no doubt about that, but it's very easy to read. I spend a lot of my time reading other people's code and I really appreciate that.

Figuring out 1000 lines of code that could have been 10 and verbosity caused by a lack of generics is not going to help you understand code quicker. Figuring out what 10 lines of Scala do may take more time compared to 10 lines of go, but that's not a measure of velocity, the information density of go is just too low. At least 10 lines of scala fit on my screen, 1000 lines of go don't.

Code style issues imho are a team issue, if you do reviews these issues can be managed.

> not all of us are unaware of the amazing "progress"

Look at Rust, at least they did their homework. With Rust out there I can't see any reason to use Go except maybe their crappy GC.

I like Rust too. I re-wrote a parser I had implemented in Go in Rust and got almost an 8x speed-up. Having said that, the two almost have no overlap for me. I don't see how Rust replaces Go in 9/10 of Go use-cases. And vice-versa.

> The fact that Scala as a language allows something like SBT to not only be created, but accepted, means I don't want anything to do with it.

FWIW, we agree and continue to use Gradle, despite making investments in Scala.

> Awesome progress that brought us Java, SOAP, C++, Javascript-on-the-server, and a slew of other tech some of us want to stay far, far away from.

When people talk about progress from PL design, they aren't talking about any of those things. If you notice, all of those things were made in industry, not in PL research/academia. Not to mention that those languages are also ones that ignored the PL design progress! (although C++ finally seems to be adding some ideas from PL research in C++17)

They're talking about things like parametric polymorphism, dependent types, modules, macros etc. (I've mostly been reading about work in the types/ML family languages, but I'm sure there's progress been made outside that as well)

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