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Comment by dvirsky | Hacker News Reader

Go is the worst programming language out there, aside from any other language I've tried so far.

Seriously though, besides being just a good solid balance between speed, ease, safety, etc without anything really exciting - there are a few cool things about Go that make you write cleaner programs: The biggest one for me (well, maybe after the concurrency model) was the whole implicit interface thing, alongside interface composition and avoiding Java-style class hierarchy. It just forces you to think in interfaces and avoid complex hierarchies. This leads to much cleaner elegant code-bases.

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Edit: @CharlesW made me realize that @dvirsky is not bashing on the language, the comment below is a reaction to their choice of words, specifically to the first sentence. That being said, I will keep my comment as is for context. I would have chosen the word “boring” rather than “worst” to describe Go, but I am not a native English speaker so maybe “worst” is okay.

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> Go is the worst programming language out there, aside from any other language I've tried so far.

Ha! Opinions, it’s always interesting to hear what other people thing about stuff I use every day.

I, on the other hand, enjoy programming with Go. It has opened a lot of doors in my career and I can even attribute my success to its existence. Roughly five years ago I was struggling to justify a higher salary in my home country; soon after I started using Go and promoting my projects people started sending invitations to interview for jobs in different companies. I took a chance and quit my job, traveled to the US, a few European countries and Asia, looking for a good company to build my next ±5 years of experience, and finally settled in one of the majors cities in Canada with a company that pays me considerably well to write programs in a language that you consider the worst out there.

But you know what? I understand your feelings, because I also have a programming language in mind that I consider the worst out there, but you will never find me throwing dirt at it or its community because I know there are people out there who enjoy working with it the same way I enjoy working with Go.

BTW, the parent commenter is saying that Go is their favorite programming language. They're using a form similar to "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time", which was quoted by Churchill.

Perhaps the first half of my first sentence made you so furious you didn't notice the second half :) Anyway, I really love Go, but I haven't written any in a long long time, which is a bit ironic since the cutoff point was when I joined Google.

I thought it would be another Turbo Pascal/Delphi with automatic memory management, instead it turned out to be just a little better than Oberon 2 + Limbo, brought back from ca 1992.

Still, better than increasing the LOC of C code available out there

After using Go and being forced to "think in composition," I loathe having to use inheritance when working in other languages. There's something about writing Go that feels crisp. When I'm having trouble making it do what I want, I almost almost realize that it was because I was doing something stupid and there was a simpler way.

Yes, exactly. But the cool thing is that it's improved me when I'm writing in other languages. The first big project I did after writing tons of Go was in C, and man was it a delight to write Go-style C. True, it wasn't nearly as elegant in syntax, and memory management was X1000 more difficult, but thinking in interfaces made everything much nicer.

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