Actually, I can't deny that I'm a language snob. I also don't think that's a bad thing. I find Go's magical maps and slices, its null pointers, its verbose error handling and its lack of generics to all be in fairly poor taste.
So, yeah, I'm a snob.
So, yeah, I'm a snob.
Different problems (and people) have different solution domains. For instance, the Union-Find algorithm [1] is straight forward to implement in an imperative language with mutation. It is significantly harder to achieve an optimal immutable version as demonstrated by a paper from 2007 [2].
There are real trade-offs between features in terms of what is easy to express. Your favorite way to program may be more difficult in Go. You think Go's features are in "poor taste." However, it is totally reasonable that different people with different problems might actually like the language. I myself have programmed in many other languages including SML and Scala and believe that for my current problems Go is a good fit.
That said, whenever I have to do even a little bit of numerical work (as I currently am doing) I miss a language with good numerical options (Python, R, Matlab, Julia, ...). Go stinks for numerical work and none of your criticisms have anything to do with why it stinks. Not having a nil pointer would not suddenly make Go a great language for numerical work.
Language choice is once again about trade-offs. I will happily take the trade-off of poor numerical support (less than 1% of my code) for concurrency primitives, compilation to native code, easy C integration, memory safety, and garbage collection. There are things to like about go and things to hate. I do hate the way errors are dealt with, poor support for writing collections, etc... But, just because I don't like those things doesn't mean it can't "get the job done."
[1] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disjoint-set_data_structure)
When it comes to software, challenging this "everything goes" culture is called "snobbery". People are called "senior engineer" after 2 years of copypasting javascript from stack overflow - and become "proficient" in a language in a week.
And yet we wonder why so much software is bloated, unreliable, insecure, overly expensive to develop.
I've chosen Go for projects specifically because it produces better software (within certain contexts). A fast simple binary, a simple language (so co-workers can look and hack on the code), etc.
To act like people are picking Go because they are ignorant or stupid or lazy (which is what the notion of "blub" always is) is unfair and lazy.
I'd argue that this might not be a stretch in some situations. If you have a lot of software development experience in varied environments (back end, front end, desktop, command line tools, embedded, etc.) and with various dissimilar programming languages (static/dynamic, compiled/interpreted, Algol-inspired/not-Algol inspired, etc.), you should at some point be able to pick up a language at a decent rate.
And even though you won't master its idioms, unlike a total newbie, you'll be aware that you don't know its idioms. A sort of "known unknowns", if you will.
Magical? What's magical about a hashmap or a pointer into an array? There are a lot of valid criticisms of Go; "magic" is not one of them.
An argument can be made for array subscripts, certainly, but why can't you use 'make' for your own code?
They're also magic in that Go does have generics, but only for those three types.
Static typing that doesn't cover common use-cases is worse then useless. It gets in your way.
I agree. See my previous comments.
> Static typing that doesn't cover common use-cases is worse then useless. It gets in your way.
I agree. Fortunately Go's static typing covers the most common use cases. If your primary deliverable is typesafe tree algorithms, Go might not be for you.