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Comment by trgv | Hacker News Reader

> I'm a much bigger proponent of languages such as Rust or Haskell which give the developer the _tools_ to ensure their own data integrity, but I guess that says something about me as a developer and why I don't like Golang.

This is a little smarmy, don't you think?

You seem to come ever-so-close to hinting something like "Go isn't fit for writing real applications." Without getting into what exactly a "real application" is, I'll just say I think this suggestion is wrong, unhelpful, elitist, and just generally irritating.

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That seems to be an intentional misreading.

The criticism of Go being presented is that it's intentionally underpowered so as to make it possible for poor developers to verbosely muddle their way through to developing working real applications without actually becoming better.

This is such an old programming language flame war trope that it was probably first written in Aramaic. When I started programming as a teenager and commented on FIDOnet BBS's, people literally said it about assembly language. If for no other reason than to preserve your own dignity, please don't imply that people program in a particular language because they're not good enough to program in other languages.

> This is such an old programming language flame war trope that it was probably first written in Aramaic.

I love the quip, but

> people literally said it about assembly language. If for no other reason than to preserve your own dignity, please don't imply that people program in a particular language because they're not good enough to program in other languages.

This is an inversion of the sentiment being expressed: the suggestion is to use languages that allow you to shift more cognitive overhead to the compiler and tooling. If anything, I program in Rust when I fear that the keeping track of all the little bits Go doesn't help me with will take up too much of my puny human brain.

That's nice and all, but how is it relevant to my paraphrasing of the grandparent comment to clarify the distinction from the parent's misreading?

As the sibling comment points out, you managed to misidentify the trope to boot.

And that's an intentional misreading of the Go devs. Read the Go Programming Language or any number of discussions by the guys behind Go and it's obvious that they care about their craft and care about writing real, working applications, while at the same time having a better understanding of what your application is doing. In their view the way to do that is through simplicity, but it's not a design decision intended to create mediocre devs.

Only the most cynical view of the language would see it that way. Just because they don't agree with your programming worldview doesn't mean they are idiots. The fact that people can say smarmy stuff like possible for poor developers to verbosely muddle their way through to developing working real applications without actually becoming better with a straight face just shows how closeminded and ideological people get about languages. Just because you know what a monad is or use map/reduce/filter plentifully doesn't mean you are a better dev than someone who has spent years honing their skills in an imperative language.

Nobody gets this ideological about natural languages. Nobody in the real world says "Hey, why are you speaking Spanish? It's so inefficient, you should be speaking Mandarin". Just as in natural language, programming languages can be learned and adapted by people of varying proficiencies, and when you "get" their particular way of modeling the world, they become an extension of you and a tool. We should just be happy when people become really good speakers of a language, not whether it is the right one.

Do people really believe that individuals such as Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, and Brian Kernighan are just trying to propagate Blub, the language, so that all devs are lowest common denominator morons? Have you seen how clever some of things they've built are? I dunno, maybe some of the original hackers have learned a lot about building complex systems over the last 50 years, and maybe they've got something useful to say.

I personally think Go and Java were developed for the same audience with similar intentions and language designer skill and are going to face the same criticisms.

For natural languages, the research seems to indicate that information is transmitted at the same rate when the languages are spoken (e.g. http://muse.jhu.edu/article/449938/pdf) with faster speaking rates compensating for higher verbosity. In terms of writing systems, though, there's definitely a ton of human potential being frittered away on learning Chinese characters and esoteric English spelling rules, but not much that can be done about it even if the Korean alphabet and German rule-adhering regularity are superior. Programming languages are all faster to learn and are iterated on much more quickly and so the possibility of realistically affecting change leads to ideological arguments.

Yes, go is a replacement for Java. Google couldn't rely forever on sun forever (see the later acquisition by Oracle and lawsuits with Google). Big companies want to own their main tools.

It's also to separate itself from the Java crowd, which has a rather poor image to a lot of people that google wants to attract.

Go happens to be a pretty nice replacement for Java in some targeted circumstances, but that is not why Go exists. Go's charter was to address deficiencies of Google's C++ programming environment, not its Java programming environment.

As it happens, outside of (perhaps) Google, C++ serverside development is so rare that Go's strengths aren't very compelling to C++ developers. That Go didn't evolve in the direction its founders expected does not mean that its founders are lying when they explain, clearly and repeatedly, what the original point of the language was.

C++ is addressed by switching to Java. Use Java when you can and C++ when there is no other option.

Java didn't cut it for Google because see my previous post.

Better tell that to the Android, GWT, Guava, OpenJDK teams.

I always hated Java but really like Go. Think it's because the Go culture and ecosystem strives for simplicity.

That was a especially informative reply. Thanks.

> Do people really believe that individuals such as Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, and Brian Kernighan are just trying to propagate Blub, the language, so that all devs are lowest common denominator morons?

It was Pike himself that stated that as a goal for Go at one of the early Goconfs, because new Googlers aren't skilled enough to pick up C++, Java or Python.

If you wish I can track it down for you.

The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt.

That's the quote people like to jump on. You could read it as humility or a nod to other languages, but it probably wasn't intended to be read as "we've designed a stupid language", and even if Pike agreed with that reading, he probably wouldn't agree that keeping programmers mediocre is a goal or a side-effect of a non-brilliant language. Don't mean to put words in his mouth, but the above quote obviously isn't meant to support anything like:

Which is an extreme criticism, but it's a pretty common assumption in most of these discussions. I mean, look at the most upvoted posts in this thread.

His quote was:

> "The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt."

It seems opposite of what you mentioned regarding C++/Java/Python.

Not really, because in spite of "probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python", Go thin set of features makes a good developer in any of those languages feel like elite.

He didn't say they weren't skilled enough to learn those languages - in fact he explicitly said they likely would know those. There's clearly a ton of evidence showing that Googlers can learn them, but having a short learning curve for the new language they're introducing still seems useful.

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