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Comment by blowski | Hacker News Reader

It’s interesting how divisive Go’s type system is. For some people it’s the main reason they use it, for others it’s a fatal handicap.

FWIW I predominantly use PHP, so I have no dog in this fight.

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I think a lot of the differences between how people view Go is based on where they are previously coming from. The C/C++ folks are used to worse or more complex type systems so they view Go as fresh air. The “better python” people love the easy to use type system and the performance improvements. But those “better python” people are used to things like package managers which the C/C++ have done just fine without. The Java people don’t understand why they should give up an expressive type system for faster compile times. (Might see this from people who love C++ templates too.)

At least that’s some generalizations I’ve observed, YMMV.

What a great comment. I know it’s a bit of a generalization but it’s helped me understand why some might get fanatical.

Good points - where one comes from really makes a difference.

I think some programmers want to carefully select a type specialized data structure, and others just bury the problem under a pile of array iteration.

And to hell with compile time. If the build takes 10x as long but we run 5% fewer prod servers, that pays for itself in minutes. And if type and nullability checking prevents one prod outage, that saves more time and stress than every build I've waited for this year.

I often don’t understand the Go teams obsession with compile times, but I’ve never worked on large Java or C++ code based that take forever to compile. I mostly want them to optimize for runtime performance even at the expense of compile time, but this does not seem popular with the core team.

You're right. You need to have worked on Google scale C++ programs to understand and acquire the obsession.

Java - expressive type system ? The bar must have been set really low by Go...

Java has generics, Go doesn't.

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