Or you could use Rust and avoid having to use "tricks" like this at all.
Go is chock full of "what were they thinking?!" decisions.
Go is chock full of "what were they thinking?!" decisions.
That’s not to say it’s all bad, far from it, but these were my wtf moments exploring the language.
This is hardly a weird choice. Garbage collection gives you the highest productivity while being memory safe out of the three options (manual, GC, static).
> lack of proper generics
They are working on parametric polymorphism, since a while now. It is hard to get right in a language which has readability and simplicity as a main focus.
> interface{}
I certainly agree on this one. It is a weird feature and often a 'smell' when found in Go code.
> the weird way of distinguishing visibility via capitalization
It is weird syntax choice in the sense of being unique/uncommon but fits very well into the readability focus of Go.
> comments that affect code generation
I agree that they should have introduced syntax for this, assuming you mean compiler flags (or w/e they're called).
> archaic plan 9 assembler instead of using LLVM
One of the goals of the language is to compile really fast, which they certainly succeed at.
I certainly agree on this one. It is a weird feature and often a 'smell' when found in Go code."
The feature itself is not a problem. Every major static language has the equivalent. It's often called something that involves the word "dynamic".
Having programmed in Go for many years now, I don't find myself using it very often in my own code. I've come to think of this as something said by either people who have never used Go at all, or people who used Go briefly but insisted on programming Javascript-in-Go or something. The latter is definitely a Bad Time... but it's always bad to program X-in-Y. If your code is shot through with interface{}, you either chose Go for something way outside of its domain, or you are not using it correctly.
"> comments that affect code generation
I agree that they should have introduced syntax for this, assuming you mean compiler flags (or w/e they're called)."
This is another criticism that I think mostly comes from people with a checklist criticism set of Go, because in practice, this is of negligible concern. It doesn't come up often, it isn't proliferating (i.e., it's not like with every point release we get another two or three new kinds of comments), it's literally never been an issue of any kind for me in the last six years. It's a complete non-issue. I am far more annoyed by, say, the fact godoc doesn't give me basic markdown than comments affecting compilation has ever annoyed me, and that's just an occasional minor annoyance.
Where it is appropriate, it is a very cool thing that you can have fully dynamically typed variables with all safeties in place. Of course, it shouldn't be used in place of better abstractions, like specific interfaces or properly factored code.
It is an issue as someone who doesn't write Go code often but occasionally reads/debugs it. At least for the first couple of times I've come across it made me scratch my head for a couple of hours, because I didn't see what the issue was it being 'hidden' in the comments. Which is fine. It just isn't in line with the general premise of Go's language design, so I wasn't even expecting it. So in a sense you are right!