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Comment by jahaja | Hacker News Reader

You seem to be writing that a simple language is somehow harder to scale for large teams. My experience is the exact opposite - too expressive language make devs have different dialects and be too "clever" for the teams long-term good - and I'm pretty dumbfounded that you can try to make sense of that.

> verbose and error-prone error handling

Verbose (and consistent) is exactly what you want for large teams. What's error prone about it?

You're tone is also suspiciously overconfident which just signals that this is more a you issue.

Do you have an example project that has problematic build times in Go?

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> You seem to be writing that a simple language is somehow harder to scale for large teams. My experience is the exact opposite - too expressive language make devs have different dialects and be too "clever" for the teams long-term good - and I'm pretty dumbfounded that you can try to make sense of that.

It doesn't matter what language you use - cleverness will come in anyways. Only the way it is achieved is different. Cleverness in the case of go will just be difficult to understand reflection, where it will be difficult to understand types in Haskell.

With go, every line of code will be simpler when compared to Haskell (picking Haskell as an arbitrary example here). However, the go program will also 10x bigger. And complexity grows over proportional with the amount of code. In the end, the understand what the whole thing is doing you will have a harder time compared to the more dense but also much shorter code in Haskell _if you are very familiar and experienced in both languages_.

I don't agree that dense code is easier to understand at all. It's both harder to understand and much harder to debug. I don't now why more code is in anyway reflective of how hard it is to understand. That would make the Redis code base harder to understand just because it has more features now than 4 years ago. That's just not true.

Haskell is also a good example, if it was easy to understand, maintain etc. we would have seen a good examples of large-scale apps and projects being developed in it by now. But we do not. Barely a single one.

> _if you are very familiar and experienced in both languages_.

This can be translated to "this is so cognitive challenging that you need to be really well-versed to not fuck this up now". That's not a good user-interface for something to scale on large teams.

> I don't agree that dense code is easier to understand at all.

I think we just have a different definition of dense code. Here is an example that shows my view on it.

Dense: adult_users = users.filter(it.isAdult) Not dense: adult_users = list.empty for(i = 0; i < users.length; i ++) { maybe_adult_user = users.get(i) if(maybe_adult_user.isAdult) adult_users += maybe_adult_user }

The first example is not only just "less" code in the sense that the filter function was also defined somewhere before and then just used. No, it is more dense code because it reduces subjective complexity by shifting some of the complexity to existing code _with which the developer hopefully is familiar with_. If the developer is not familiar with it, then the code is actually _more complicated_.

The same thing happens to language features, not only to code reuse. Some languages have generics, some don't. Without understanding and familiarity with generics, they will make everything more difficult. Once they are understood, the developer has a productivity advantage (assuming that generics are helpful).

However, gaining this initial knowledge and familiarity is very hard, hence not so many people use Haskell or similar languages and many more people use javascript and python and php, so you see more large-scale apps written in them. But we also see that all big companies eventually struggle with the not-dense-enough code and build on top of these languages. Facebook with php->hack, stripe with their own version of Ruby, ...

> You seem to be writing that a simple language is somehow harder to scale for large teams

I've worked on a large Scala program before, and because the team generally agreed not to let things get too crazy, it was very manageable. However, I've seen other programs in complex languages get out of hand.

There is a sweet spot in terms of language simplicity/complexity and usability. Make it too simplistic (like golang) and the low modeling ability and inexpressiveness of the language will result in shifting the complexity into the code and onto the programmer, there's no running away from it, it's just reality. IMO, languages like Java, C#, and Kotlin do a much better job at balancing features with modeling power and expressiveness, without sacrificing simplicity.

> Verbose (and consistent) is exactly what you want for large teams. What's error prone about it?

I've seen many instances where errors are ignored by mistake, e.g.:

    a, err := foo()
    if err != nil { ... }

    b, err := bar()
    // oops, error not handled and compiler doesn't complain
    
    c, err := baz()
    if err != nil { ... }

not to mention things like

   defer file.Close() // Error not handled

and more insidious occurrences (e.g. when was the last time you handled the error for fmt.Println()?)

Consistent is good, verbose just for the sake of being verbose isn't. And honestly golang is not that consistent (e.g. the entire nil interface is not nil issue is just bizzare)

> Do you have an example project that has problematic build times in Go?

At my employer, we use a monorepo and build with bazel. Builds routinely take several minutes, and even more on "less powerful" machines (e.g. 4 cores). Linking time is abysmal, and we routinely end up with 50+MB binaries. It's closed source so I can't share them.

> I've worked on a large Scala program before, and because the team generally agreed not to let things get too crazy, it was very manageable. However, I've seen other programs in complex languages get out of hand.

In my experience this kind of gatekeeping eventually breaks down due to deadlines and similar. There's also a slow rot that always creeps in, and unfortunately seniority doesn't always keep "clever" solutions and general over engineering out.

But it looks like we'll have to agree to disagree here.

> I've seen many instances where errors are ignored by mistake, e.g.:

It's true that there's sometime bugs due to mistyping err != nil sometimes. But I have not noticed that it's too often or that it's somehow is such a large problem that it out-weigh the benefits of the clarity and simple flow brings.

> At my employer, we use a monorepo and build with bazel.

Hard to compare with an anecdote like that, I just haven't heard much complaints regarding compile times, if anything the opposite, and certainly not that it's a significant problem in a pros/cons comparison.

> In my experience this kind of gatekeeping eventually breaks down due to deadlines and similar.

I don't disagree. That's why I said the sweet spot is much closer to Java/C#/Kotlin.

> But I have not noticed that it's too often

That's the problem though. Those silent difficult to detect bugs are what affect reliability and safety. With exceptions, you're going to have to explicitly ignore them, whereas with golang errors, it's much easier to misuse them. Not to mention the fact that golang errors are basically strings, which makes dealing with them very error prone.

> Hard to compare with an anecdote like that, I just haven't heard much complaints regarding compile times, if anything the opposite, and certainly not that it's a significant problem in a pros/cons comparison.

My guess is that most people don't use golang for large projects, and few who do don't care about the long compile times.

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