Comment by the_other_guy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_other_guy | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I don't understand why it is so hard to add enums for example, Golang authors are fiercely defiant to adding many small essential features. I understand that they worship the statement "simple is beautiful", but they took the statement to a whole another unprecedentedly stupid level. And even after all the resistance towards generics, dependency management and error handling, they are trying to fix them very late and probably not through a good way

[Edit] whoa! until 4 minutes ago this comment was +6 and now it's -1, I am sure these are purely uncoordinated downvotes, sums up the hostility in the Golang community towards any kind of improvement or even the slightest shred of criticism, even though I use Golang heavily and I don't actually hate it, I really don't understand this hostility everywhere online (github, HN, reddit, etc...)

[Edit2] mass downvotes, still ZERO explanation. Typical golang "fans"

There are proposals to add enums to Go [1]. Enums are specific instance of sum types (aka discriminated unions), and while having simple typed enums would be nice, Go would benefit, in my opinion, from having true sum types, and this has also been proposed [2].

Unfortunately, due to Go's current semantics (e.g. zero values) and memory layout, adding sum types is not as straightforward as one might hope [3]. However, given that Go2 is allowed to break backwards compatibility, something might come out of the discussion.

[1] https://github.com/golang/go/issues/19814

[2] https://github.com/golang/go/issues/19412

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/46bd5h/ama_we_are_t...

Explanation: your comment was unnecessary hostile itself (“unprecedentedly stupid level”), and folks are following the time honored tradition of downvoting and moving along.

It really looks like you’re trying to pick a fight. It’s cool if you want enums. I miss them too. That’s not the problem here.

The enum thing was just an example, that wasn't even the main point of my comment

This has in fact nothing to do with the story itself.

It would be fun to take polls on those points to see whether go users like it or not in a way for example through GitHub login but only allow users of a golang project that has been existing for a while before the poll started or put it in the yearly stackoverflow surveys.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com