For reference, I'm not holding up Python as a good language, I'm holding it up as a comparable one. Python is warty and creaky, but more mainstream than CL, so it's a fair comparison.
A good language would be Go.
A good language would be Go.
For a point of comparison, let's look at StandardML as a language that I believe is objectively good, but with an ecosystem that is objectively not good. The type system is amazing. The syntax is as simple as go (designed to be easy for students to implement), but more powerful. Unlike "goroutines", CML (concurrent extensions to SML) are sound and actually work. Most of the headliner features debated in go 2 are already present (with ones like parametric polymorphism having extremely elegant solutions baked in). The compilers (eg, polyML or mlton) even spit out extremely fast code.
Without a Google-level backer, SML just sits there kept alive by a small group of academics who work on the parts that interest them and their research. If even a fraction of Google's resources dedicated to Go were put into the SML ecosystem, golang would have never come to be.
My point is that why a language succeeds or fails is seldom related to the actual merits of the language itself. Almost every one of the most popular languages has one or more corporate backers with deep pockets who made it what it was then maintained it going forward. Consider that Rust at its core is a complex, C-like syntax on top of SML, but had a company willing to pour millions into developing the language.
Lisp lost what backers it had due to the AI winter killing them off. Nobody else stepped up, so the language languishes.
Agree fully on your review of Go.
Purely subjectively, alot of what I'm seeing in Go so far looks to me like a "2nd system design" for C programmers. I'm hoping that the concurrency model is where it shines through with some good new ideas and implementations because I've been relatively unimpressed with the rest of it so far. That's not to say it's bad per se, but I've seen nothing in it that makes it stand out from other languages design-wise, and it feels rather warty to me so far...
Purely my own subjective opinion.
That seems fairly accurate.
> I'm hoping that the concurrency model is where it shines
I'd say that channels aren't quite the magic thing they are made out to be and goroutines aren't that amazing. The real win of go for me is three things:
1. Evented runtime with a synchronous interface. "Go is my favorite epoll library"
2. A standard lib that has great http support (things like keepalive and connection pooling and http2)
3. A build and test toolchain that makes coverage and race detection and memory and CPU and lock contention profiling trivial.
1.) Letting good programmers get things done without feeling too many constraints, and without hating the output of #2.
2.) Enabling decent programmers understand the output of #1, while still getting things done themselves.
It is an extremely practical language ‘project’, in that it doesn’t pretend that all programmers are great, or average, and it tries to help the two subsets work together.
How can it be a fair comparison, when Python isn't even a real functional language? (lambdas have been intentionally crippled, there is a separation between statements and functions, not everything is an expression, and so on...)