> And while I do know Golang, having to write it makes me want to chuck my computer in a lake and I'll within epsilon of never contribute to a tool written in it.
Why this level of hatred for Go?
Why this level of hatred for Go?
And I would never say that that is an indefensible viewpoint. If I was selecting tools for people who are not me and people who I don't think I can effectively train and coach and lead into being better at what they're ostensibly here to do, I might even advocate for it. But I am not afraid of being too clever for myself. In production capacities, you should be prevented from being too clever by this through the taste that you should have developed as a practitioner of the craft of software development (and your code reviewers should be backing you up on if you don't have that yet). And in exploratory capacities, being too clever should be encouraged--because that's how you become good at your job in the first place.
I believe that, instead of throwing up our hands and just stapling a high-cut filter on programming as a craft, one can and should build better systems that actually use the computer to do the tedious tasks involved in making sure that you've actually expressed solutions to problems in a clear and reliable way. Tools that do exactly what I described do exist; along very different axes, both TypeScript (structurally typed and with really flexible and easily expressed generics) and Rust (lower-level borrow-checker B&D but with a raft of niceties to soften the blow; "good C++ with a great IDE" ends up here too, though there's a lot of bad C++ too) scratch exactly that itch for me.
Those tools (and others, in greater or lesser measure) reward me for thinking deeply about a problem. My reward is being saddled with less and clearer code to deal with in the future. And that's amazing! On the other hand, I have felt, each and every time I have been stuck using it, that by leaving any questions of difficulty to the programmer to handle a bunch of e-janitor stuff--bad error handling, really embracing its actually-just-Java-1.4-self by not supporting generics, etc.--Golang just wastes my time. I end up with more code that's harder to read and is better able to conceal errors both of omission and commission. Golang punts the solving of the actually hard problems of software craftsmanship to the programmer and I resent that. It should be helping me, not fucking off with the job half-done.
Don't get me wrong: I don't begrudge others its use, except when I'm stuck using it because of previous choices made, but it's the only programming language in common use that makes me feel bad to use it. (Which is to say that yeah, there are worse, but I don't exactly have to deal with them.) To me, the repelling effect is strong enough that it really is one of two languages (hi, PHP) on my under-no-circumstances list.
Golang is not a "simple language", though. C# is a simple language, and while it sometimes frustrates me its decisions make sense. Golang is a simplistic language. There is value in being simple; there is little value in being simplistic.