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Comment by _ieq6 | Hacker News Reader

I regret learning go as my first language.

Every other language just looks awful.

Every language sucks: C++ is too complex, Haskell is too wound up with GHC, Lisp is hard to find a use for outside of Emacs, Java attracts bad libraries, Rust is hard to write simple data structures in, JS was written in a week, bash is hard to read, Python has the GIL, etc, etc.

But programming is fun and it’s especially fun to move easily among all these flawed tools and accomplish a goal.

Golang is ok, the runtime is pretty weak compared to modern JVMs and tight C++ is faster, Clojure and Haskell are denser. It’s ok but I wouldn’t stop checking out other stuff.

Every language sucks

It's all about cost/benefit tradeoffs. Programming involves making cost/benefit decisions many times a day. Running a programming shop is that multiplied by the number of people, squared. Technical debt is about unresolved cost/benefit tradeoffs from the past.

I think one's first language usually taints the way one looks at other languages. For me I learned Python 3 first. So even Python 2 looks not so great, and learning Go from Python 3 was a bit rough though I've since learned to love Golang -- ask me in a bit when the honeymoon phase ends though ;-)

People say that about Lisp as well.

I think it’s for different reasons. Go as a language is just fine, but Go as a framework for building software is just fantastic. The tooling is comprehensive and easy to use, testing is built in, and the happy path is almost always highlighted for you. No need to figure out which documentation generator, style guideline/formatter, test framework, build system, package manager, etc to use and these are easy to use (with the notable exception of package management, which has been rocky but is improving). Lisp is a neat and powerful little language but the tooling and documentation are often lacking and it’s often difficult to figure out even which lisp is right for your project.

Except that most of the tools that come with Go are pretty mediocre. Go's debugger is worse than mediocre.

The debugger isn’t great. Most things just work, and they just work well for the most popular use cases. Documentation is just comments—no special syntax to memorize and no need to maintain infrastructure to parse docstrings and publish to a web server. It also runs the examples to make sure they work. The build system doesn’t require you to learn a special (typically imperative) project configuration language or Makefile generator. It also outputs a statically-linked binary by default—no VMs or interpreters or libraries to shop separately. Although it doesn’t have a comprehensive assertion suite, Go ships with a unit test framework that just works, which is more than can be said for most languages. And all of these things are standard so you can pretty much jump into any project and build it, run its test suite, and begin contributing with little more than a text editor and the Go toolchain. So yeah, Go’s tooling is simply fantastic and no other mainstream language except Rust comes close. This isn’t a fanboy statement; there are lots of other factors to consider, but Go’s tooling is top notch.

I can relate. It is almost addictive to write in a Lisp. Clojure specifically. I cannot pinpoint exactly why that is, but I believe it has something to do with its neat syntax and the peace of mind it creates when writing in a mostly functional style. It feels like I don't need to worry about the language but rather about the problem.

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