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Comment by Philip-J-Fry | Hacker News Reader

But no one said Go was easy. It's just simple and easy to reason about. There's a huge benefit to something doing exactly what it says. No hidden behaviours, no overly complex syntax, nothing like that.

I came from C# where I have gotten increasingly frustrated with the amount of additions to the language. Like we now have classes, structs and records. We now have async/await but we also have channels. This is what having a huge toolbox causes. Some people are going to write code using channels, me others will use async. Some people will use features that others don't care about.

I think there's huge benefit in a simple language. In Go I know that there's only 2 ways to do concurrency. You either use go routines and mutexes or you use go routines and channels.

Generics will bring a lot of helper functions that weren't possible before which will remove a lot of repetitive code.

But otherwise I am super happy with writing Go code. All my pet peeves of something like modern Java or C# are gone.

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> But no one said Go was easy.

Lot's of people have said go is easy. In particular that go code is "easy to read" is an oft-cited benefit of go.

Also, if you go to golang.org and the first thing you see is:

> Go is an open source programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software.

(emphasis mine)

Go is easy != easy to read.

I personally do think Go is easy to read. The fact that I don't get bitten in the ass by hidden behaviours and there's no inheritance to step through 5 files of. The fact that everyone's Go code looks more or less the same (unless you're an absolute beginnner) because there's only so many ways to do something. Compared to C# where reading someone else's code means I have to take a shot to calm my nerves and then take a guess at which permutation of language features they decided to use today.

A simple language is easier to read. This doesn't mean it's going to be easy for anyone who isn't a Go developer. There's no claims of that. But given a week to understand syntax and getting used to reading files, I don't think there's many places where you'd get stumped.

>Go is an open source programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software.

This still holds true for me. A simple language builds simple software. No noob Go dev is going to have a good time, but that's true in almost every language. Once you understand how everything works, how interfaces work, how channels work, you can simplify down most problems and build them with ease. Needing to write a few extra lines of code doesn't mean you can't write simple, reliable and efficient software.

Neither of those quotes say Go is an all round easy language. It's not like you can throw it at a baby and get back Kubernetes. It's not easy to do custom containers, it's not easy to do manipulate lists, it's not easy to do a bunch of things you'd do in one line in something like C#. But I think these are small hurdles for the mental burden you're relieved of when you see that the rest of the language is equally as simple and benefits from it.

I think c# is an unfair comparison in this instance.

You are right, c# does too much. But Go makes it far more work to do basic things - list comprehension for example (what is everyones obsession with for loops?). An opinated language with one way to do things sounds great, but not at the expense of basic niceities you get in other languages.

For what it's worth, I'll take for loops over list comprehensions any day of the week. I just find it a lot easier to read.

Agreed! Check out pythons move with walrus operators inside list comprehensions - I think u can do that now - starts to be line noise

So you are claiming this

  arr2 := []int{}
  for i := range arr1 {
    if arr1[i] > 9 {
      arr2 = append(arr2, arr1[i] * 2)
    }
  }

Is more readable than these?

  var arr2 = arr1.Where(x => x > 9).Select(x => x*2);
  var arr2 = from x in arr1 where x > 9 select x*2;
  arr2 = [x * 2 for x in arr1 where x > 9]
  (setf arr2 (loop for x across arr1 when (> x 9) collect (* x 2)))

I honestly can't imagine by what measure any of the latter ones could be harder to understand the former. And as the complexity of the expression increases, I only see the advantage increasing typically (though often it pays to split it into multiple comprehensions, just like a loop that does too much).

Personally? Yes (except for the first example you gave, which I don’t classify as “list comprehension”).

It’s not inherent complexity though, just personal preference. I grew up writing for loops so they’re second nature to me and I grok them instantly in a single pass, whereas some list comprehensions require a re-read (particularly if they’re nested).

Different strokes, that’s all.

Fair enough!

It's exactly this sort of comment that gives go lovers a bad name.

As someone who reads a lot more Go than I write, Go is awful to read.

Reading Go means that I keep having to read idioms (as posted in the article) and parse them back into the actual intent, rather than just reading the intent directly. But I can't even trust that, since the nth rewrite of the idiom might have screwed it up subtly.

Reading Go means that I can't easily navigate to the definition of a function, because it implicitly merges folders into a single namespace, so I have to try them one by one.

Reading Go means that I usually don't have tooling that can jump to definition, because there are umpteen different dependency management tools, and Gopls only supports one of them.

Reading Go means that even when I have tooling available, and it feels like working today, jump-to-definition becomes impossible as soon as interfaces are involved, because structural typing makes it impossible to know what is an intentional implementation of that interface.

>Reading Go means that I can't easily navigate to the definition of a function, because it implicitly merges folders into a single namespace, so I have to try them one by one.

Not sure what you mean here

>Reading Go means that I usually don't have tooling that can jump to definition, because there are umpteen different dependency management tools, and Gopls only supports one of them.

There's 1 dependency management tool though. It's go modules. Unless you live 2 years in the past?

>Reading Go means that even when I have tooling available, and it feels like working today, jump-to-definition becomes impossible as soon as interfaces are involved, because structural typing makes it impossible to know what is an intentional implementation of that interface.

You just right click in VS Code and click "Go to implementations". Or if you use Goland it's right there on the gutter.

Reading comments like this really makes me wonder if anyone complaining about Go has actually used it.

> Not sure what you mean here

In Rust, if I see a call to `foo::bar::baz()`, I instantly know that `foo/bar.rs` or `foo/bar/mod.rs` (and only one will ever exist) contains either a `fn baz()` (in which case I'm done) or a `pub use spam::baz;` (in which case I can follow the same algorithm again).

In Go, if I see a call to `import ("foo/bar"); bar.baz()`, all I know is that ONE of the files in the folder `foo/bar` contains a function `baz`, with no direction on which it is.

> There's 1 dependency management tool though. It's go modules. Unless you live 2 years in the past?

As I said, 99% of my interaction with Go is reading the code that other people wrote. I don't make the decisions about which dependency management tools they use.

> You just right click in VS Code and click "Go to implementations". Or if you use Goland it's right there on the gutter.

I use Emacs, but VS Code still uses the same broken Gopls.

> Reading comments like this really makes me wonder if anyone complaining about Go has actually used it.

Can't really say I disagree, I guess.

Let's go with "Go is easy if you use an appropriate IDE"

Emacs is great for many things, but Go was clearly designed with GUI IDE tooling in mind. So if you decide to forfeit that huge benefit, of course it'll be a sub-optimal experience.

> Go was clearly designed with GUI IDE tooling in mind.

Surprisingly not. One of Go's authors commented many times in the early days that Go shouldn't need an IDE, only a text editor. He even commented that syntax highlighting/coloring were unnecessary distractions.

He said:

there was talk early in the project about whether Go needed an IDE to succeed. No one on the team had the right skill set, though, so we did not try to create one. However, we did create core libraries for parsing and printing Go code, which soon enabled high-quality plugins for all manner of editor and IDE, and that was a serendipitous success.

Which I read as they considered IDEs important.

I'll accept that as a reasonable conclusion. Then he also said the following:

https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/

https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/hJHCAaiL0so/m/kG3B...

(and some other stuff about syntax highlighting from around that time (?) I couldn't find.)

So maybe it was a bit of both.

To be fair, we then had to throw all of those "high-quality" plugins in the garbage where they belonged, and go with Microsoft's Language Server architecture instead to really have a usable Go IDE experience in something like Emacs or vim (GoLand from JetBrains is of course much better, and that might be using some of the built-in Go tools?).

What makes Emacs not a GUI IDE?

> Go was clearly designed with GUI IDE tooling in mind.

I would like to see what happens if you say this to Rob "syntax highlighting is for children" Pike's face.

I happily use golang in vim using gopls. I don't see an IDE being a requirement at all.

This is pretty much an IDE though (which is not a bad thing!)

Gopls works great with Emacs.

> In Go, if I see a call to `import ("foo/bar"); bar.baz()`, all I know is that ONE of the files in the folder `foo/bar` contains a function `baz`, with no direction on which it is.

This is a code smell for poor file organization in your "foo/bar" module - in a well organized project, it should be obvious which file in a module contains a given function[1]. Go doesn't force file=module paradigm (preferring the folder to be the basis), however, it doesn't preclude having one file per module, if that's what you prefer. If you're reading someone else's poorly organized code, you can always use grep.

1. Say, you have an `animal` module, the first place you check for `NewCow()` is `animal/cow.go`

> Go doesn't force file=module paradigm (preferring the folder to be the basis),

Yes, this is what that complaint was about?

> however, it doesn't preclude having one file per module, if that's what you prefer.

> 1. Say, you have an `animal` module, the first place you check for `NewCow()` is `animal/cow.go`

This whole subthread was about reading other people's Go code. Of course your own code is going to look organized to yourself!

> If you're reading someone else's poorly organized code, you can always use grep.

Yeah, ripgrep tends to be what saves me in the end. Still annoying to have to break it out all the time.

> Yes, this is what that complaint was about?...This whole subthread was about reading other people's Go code.

So the complaint, restated is "Go doesn't prevent other people from writing bad code?" Am I getting you right? If so, well, I have nothing to say about that.

edit: I do actually have something to say. I just remembered having to work with an 82,000-line long Perl module file that would defeat any IDE. Fun times. No language can save you from poorly organized projects, whether the modules are file-based or folder-based.

I would say it's closer to "Go doesn't do a really simple thing that nudges people towards writing more readable code, while having basically no tradeoffs".

Considering the far more tedious tradeoffs that Go does force on users in the name of supposed readability (for example: the lack of generics), I'd consider that a pretty big failure.

I don't expect them to be perfect. I do expect them to try.

FYI: Go's lack of generics was not related to readability - the Go team didn't have a solution they liked, so instead of saddling the language with a half-assed solution forever, they waited for a more elegant solution. Also: the design of Go generics was recently approved (as in the past month).

It's no secret that Go is targeted at "programming at large". Go's design favors larger, fewer modules, how those modules are structured is left to teams/individuals. I may be lucky to work with a great team, but I always find the code where I expect to find it. When I'm starting from scratch, I utilize modules, <$VERB>er interfaces, structs and receiver functions: I cannot remember ever running into an ambiguous scenario where I'm unsure where a particular piece of code ought to go.

Like the parent, I read more Go than I write, and I have never seen a single-file-per-module (unless the entire project is one file). And sometimes it's obvious what file a function is from (like in your examples), but a lot of times it isn't. For example is `GiveFoodToCow` in food.go or cow.go? Maybe there are patterns that experienced gophers know, but that adds cognitive load. And would having a 1 file per module paradigm have made go any more complicated?

food.go and cow.go do not belong in the same (sub)module, IMO. That said, each team (and project) have unique sensibilities - consistency and familiarity help here. My gut feeling is that the "belongingness" of feeding a cow is closer to the cow than the food, unless your food.go is full of "GiveFoodToCow(), GiveFoodToChicken(),...GiveFoodToX()" which is gross. With that complexity, you're better of with a Feeder interface and implement Feed() in cow.go (and chicken.go, etc). If you cannot distill the logic to a single interface, you're probably better off with a receiver (or regular) function in cow.go, because having a list of GiveFoodToX() with different args in food.go is the worst possible design you could go with.

> And would having a 1 file per module paradigm have made go any more complicated?

I was being facetious. Under normal circumstances, no one should use one file per module in Go, but if Rubyists are feeling home-sick while writing Go, the option is available to them ;)

> In Rust, if I see a call to `foo::bar::baz()`, I instantly know that `foo/bar.rs` or `foo/bar/mod.rs`

In Rust, you would see `Bar::baz()` and have no clue where `Bar` is defined. The common style is `use something::somewhere::Bar`.

but if you see `Bar::baz` you can just go to the top of the file, and find the `use something::somewhere::Bar`, and then know what file `Bar` is defined in. In go, the import line only tells you what module/folder it is in, and you either need some tool or some intuition on how the module is organized into files to know what file to look for the definition in.

And then in Rust, that file ends up just saying `pub use ...`, and the real code is in a different module.

The first one is an issue, not just for reading but also for writing; you'll find slightly similar ways of doing the same thing, and Murphy's (Real) Law kicks in "If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it."

The rest of the issues seem to be tooling issues, not an issue with Go itself. There are tools out there that do the right thing (personally I'm old school and use gotags, warts and all), so I'd suggest get better tools that work for you (or write one if you can't find one you like).

> Reading Go means that I keep having to read idioms (as posted in the article) and parse them back into the actual intent,

What? I never have to do this...

> I can't easily navigate to the definition of a function . . . I usually don't have tooling that can jump to definition

What? You command-click on it... ?

> jump-to-definition becomes impossible as soon as interfaces are involved, because structural typing makes it impossible to know what is an intentional implementation of that interface

What? You obviously can't jump-to-definition of an interface, but in what way is this a limitation?

> Reading Go means that I keep having to read idioms (as posted in the article) and parse them back into the actual intent, rather than just reading the intent directly. But I can't even trust that, since the nth rewrite of the idiom might have screwed it up subtly.

This. Also, this idea that simple(r) = easy to read just doesn't hold. Is brainfuck easy to read? It's very simple. Even without being so extreme, we could simplify go replacing loops and structured ifs with "if-gotos". Or remove list enumeration as in range(my list) and only allow using integer indexing. Would that make go easier to read or reason about?

"A simple language is easier to read." "A simple language builds simple software".

It's become a cliche to bring up brainfuck here, but it really is a direct refutation of these ideas, being a maximally simple language that produces maximally complicated code.

Go _is_ easy to read. I can read almost any go codebase, even giant ones, and see what's going on pretty quickly. Same with C - the Linux kernel is surprisingly easy to understand once you know the basic data structures it uses. There is a lot of benefit in using simple/limited languages from a readability point of view.

The data structures in C require thorough documentation to have any chance to keep your foots. And keeping the preprocessor wizards in check. But I agree that Linux authors have done a consistently good job.

In fact, a kernel is even easier to read than other programs whose authors worked as hard, because having no external libraries at all also helps.

Reading the kernel is relatively easy since some people worked hard on a structure, which is relatively clean.

There are many macro C code bases with tons of function pointer fun (for example when doing OOP) where you have a hard time to find things, till you spent considerable time learning the choices made in that code base.

Yeah true, macro heavy code can be really difficult, as you can make your own metalanguage with macros. The ruby codebase is a lot like that, but I still find it pretty easy to read. But I can imagine someone going crazy with macros could really make it hard, but that's not the norm in my experience.

Maybe for small pieces of code, but getting the overall higher level feature goals of code in go is hell (for me). The lack of function overloading to generalize intent for generic work is abysmal and outdated. It pains me to no end that their built in functions are overloaded, but I can't do it in my own go code.

Generally speaking if you're modestly familiar with a language it's rare that it's difficult to read small pieces of code. The hard part of programming on a team is writing code such that high level intent is quickly apparent with APIs that support that intent and make it easy to understand where edge-case handling is happening vs direct feature intent

Go is easy to read

simple != easy.

> No hidden behaviours, no overly complex syntax, nothing like that.

Arrays vs. slices and standard functions dealing with slices are full of weird behaviour, unnecessarily complex syntax and obscure features. Like, why are there even arrays at all? Which slice functions return a copy and which ones don't? Why is append() so braindamaged to make a copy sometimes? Why do I need make() as often as I do when mostly the language knows all make() would do?

Go still has lots of footguns, even right at the trivial basics.

"Like, why are there even arrays at all?"

Because while Go is garbage collected, it also provides modest control over memory layout. Arrays are allocated chunks of contiguous memory for holding a fixed number of things. Slices are something that sit on top of that and let you not worry too much about that.

You almost never want arrays yourself, but they are a legitimate use case that the language has to provide because you can't create them within the language itself. But the right answer for most programmers is to ignore "arrays" in Go entirely.

"Why is append() so braindamaged to make a copy sometimes?"

(Tone: Straight, not snark.) If you understand what slices are and how they are related to arrays, it becomes clear that "append" would be braindamaged if it didn't sometimes make copies. Go is simple, sure, but it was never a goal of Go to try to make it so you don't have to understand how it works to use it properly.

It is a fair point that quite a few tutorials don't make it clear what that relationship is. Most of them try, but probably don't do a good enough job. I think more of them should show what a slice is on the inside [1]; it tends to make it clear in a way that a whole lot of prose can't. "Show my your code and I will remain confused; show me your data structures and I won't need to see your code; it'll be obvious."

[1]: https://golang.org/pkg/reflect/#SliceHeader

Of course Go has hidden behaviors and overly complex syntax, like any programming language before or after.

For example:

  xrefs := []*struct{field1 int}{}
  for i := range longArrayName {
    longArrayName[i].field = value
    xrefs = append(xrefs, &longArrayName[i])
  }

Perfectly fine code. Now after a simple refactor:

  xrefs := []*struct{field1 int}{}
  for _,x := range longArrayName {
    x.field = value
    xrefs = append(xrefs, &x)
  }

Much better looking! But also completely wrong now, unfortunately. `defer` is also likely to cause similar problems with refactoring, given its scope-breaking function border.

And Go also has several ways of doing most things. Sure, C# has more, but as long as there is more than one the problems are similar.

And I'm sure in time Go will develop more ways of doing things, because the advantage of having a clean way to put your intent into code usually trumps the disadvantage of having to learn another abstraction. This is still part of Go's philosophy, even though Go's designers have valued it slightly less than others. If it weren't, they wouldn't have added Channels to the language, as they are trivial to implement using mutexes, which are strictly more powerful.

I don't think this is a good example of proving the point that Go is difficult to read. Isn't it expected to internalize the semantics of basic language primitives when learning a new language, or does people just jump in guessing what different language constructs do? IMHO you learn this the first week when reading up on the language features.

range returns index and elements by value. The last example does what you asks of it, it's like complaining something is not returned by reference when it's not. Your mistake. Perhaps some linter could give warnings for it.

I don't think you can truly internalize the varying semantics of which operations return lvalues and which return rvalues. At least, I haven't yet been able to in ~2 years of Go programming, and it's a constant source of bugs when it comes up.

The lack of any kind of syntactic difference between vastly different semantic operations is at the very least a major impediment to readability. After all, lvalues vs rvalues are one of the biggest complexities of C's semantics, and they have been transplanted as-is into Go.

As a much more minor gripe, I'd also argue that the choice of making the iteration variable a copy of the array/slice value instead of a reference to it is the least useful choice. I expect it has been done because of the choice to make map access be an rvalue unlike array access which is an lvalue, which in turn would have given different semantics to slice iteration vs map iteration. Why they chose to have different semantics for map access vs array access, but to have the same semantics for map iteration vs array iteration is also a question I have no answer to.

> and they have been transplanted as-is into Go

Hum... I don't think anything can return an lvalue in C.

Your first paragraph is not a huge concern when programming in C, declarations create lvalues, and that's it. I imagine you are thinking about C++, and yes, it's a constant source of problems there... So, Go made the concept much more complex than on the source.

I think Go has exactly C's semantics here. The following is valid syntax with the same semantics in both:

  array[i] = 9
  *pointer = 9
  array[i].fieldName = 9
  (*pointer).fieldName = 9
  structValue.fieldName = 9  
  pointer->fieldName = 9 // Go equivalent: pointer.fieldName = 9

  // you can also create a pointer to any of these lvalues
  // in either language with &

Go has some additional syntax in map[key], but that behaves more strangely (it's an lvalue in that you can assign to it - map[key] = value - but you can't create a pointer to it - &(map[key]) is invalid syntax).

> I don't think anything can return an lvalue in C.

Btw, I was curious to check , here is an example of a function returning an lvalue:

  struct test {
    int a;
  } global;

  struct test* foo() {
    return &global;
  }

  int main (int argc, char**argv) {
    printf("%d", global.a); //wil print 0

    foo()->a = 9;
    //or (*(foo())).a = 9;

    printf("%d", global.a); //will print 9
  }

I think this is actually a very good example of the inverse relationship between logical complexity and language complexity.

A language that has implicit copy/move semantics is easier to write (since it's less constrained), and more difficult to read (since in order to understand the code, one needs to know the rules).

A language that has explicit copy/move semantics, is more difficult to write (since the rules will need to be adhered to), but easier to read (because the constraints are explicit).

Although I don't program in Golang, another example that pops into my mind is that slices may refer to old versions of an array. This makes working with arrays easier when writing (as in "typing"), but more difficult when reading (as in understanding/designing), because one needs to track an array references (slices). (correct me if I'm wrong on this).

In this perspective, I do think that a language that is simpler to write can be more difficult to read, and this is one (two) case where this principle applies.

(note that I don't imply with that one philosophy is inherently better than the other)

EDIT: added slices case.

What exactly is the difference here? Is the `x` variable being updated in the second sample so that the stored references all point to the same item?

Yes, that code is equivalent to

  xrefs := []*struct{field1 int}{}
  var x struct{field1 int}
  for i := range longArrayName {
    x = longArrayName[i] //overwrite x with the copy
    x.field = value //modify the copy in x
    xrefs = append(xrefs, &x) //&x has the same value regardless of i
  }

The desired refactoring would have been to this:

  xrefs := []*struct{field1 int}{}
  for i := range longArrayName {
    x := &longArrayName[i] //this also declares x to be a *struct{field1 int}
    x.field = value
    xrefs = append(xrefs, x)
  }

> Like we now have classes, structs and records.

IMO records are a great addition, especially when it comes to point-in-time/immutable data. They also provide an improvement to developer efficiency, as basic data classes can be represented with a single line record definition.

> We now have async/await but we also have channels. Some people are going to write code using channels, me others will use async.

I'm not really sure what you're talking about here. C# has no concept of a channel. If you referring to the "System.Threading.Channels" package, it exists for those in the community that would benefit from it, and still uses familiar async/await syntax. It's also a very niche package that is unlikely to have significant adoption, so there's no real concern of the pattern "segmenting" the community.

> It's just simple and easy to reason about.

These aren't the same thing. Brainfuck is "simple" in the same sense - no hidden behaviors or complex syntax - but it's virtually impossible to tell at a glance what a Brainfuck program does, or say with certainty how it will react to different inputs. Complexity has to live somewhere, and the more restrictive the language, the more complexity is moved to the program structure. Conversely, every special-purpose construct in a language is a place where you don't have to rely on reasoning about an unboundedly complex Turing-complete system, and can instead go and check the documentation for what it does.

I don't entirely disagree but I can't help noticing, you mentioned two ways to do concurrency in C# and two ways to do it in Go.

Actually Rob Pike said that Go was supposed to be "easy to understand and adopt": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwajp0g-bY4

> But otherwise I am super happy with writing Go code. All my pet peeves of something like modern Java or C# are gone.

I'm always confused by this. Why do people consistency cherry pick specific languages to compare then when those languages offer fundamentally different paradigms? I understand comparing C/C++ vs Go, but isn't obvious that C# is going to be fundamentally different than Go?

Yes it's obvious, but it doesn't prevent OP from liking go more than c#/java.

Furthermore, its very likely that the languages people 'cherry pick' are actually languages they use everyday. So they just compare 'new everyday language' to 'previous everyday languages', and just tell you whether they're happier or not when they write code. The point is not really about the language theoretical properties and merits, but how people experience the language in real life.

C# and Java are much closer to Go than C++. C is also closer from another perspective (simplistic syntax).

C++ is about as far from Go as you can imagine a language. Maybe only Prolog would be a worse comparison point.

C++ is designed with one goal in mind: no special compiler built-ins. If it is possible to do it at all, it can be done in a 3rd party library. C++'s design philosophy is Library first. Bjarne Stroustroup explicitly advocates this: don't write special case code. Write a library that solves the problem, then use that library to achieve your special case.

Go doesn't think writing libraries is a useful endeavor for most programmers: they should be writing application code, and let their betters design the tools they need, build them into the compiler, and stop wasting time designing your own abstractions.

> C++ is about as far from Go as you can imagine a language. Maybe only Prolog would be a worse comparison point.

https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponenti...

/headscratch

EDIT: I think you're misinterpreting syntax of the language with use case. e.g. low level vs high level programming language

I'm not talking about either syntax nor use case, but about language philosophy, the approach to problem solving embodied in the language - the "paradigm" as you called it. As that post points out, even inside Google, the C++ committee members had a vastly different vision than Rob Pike on what makes a language good. C++11 is essentially universally loved in the C++ community as a giant step forward, as are most subsequent revisions. Rob apparently hates them.

Even the article shows that Go and C++ are fundamentally at odds philosophically, in terms of their paradigm:

> Jokes aside, I think it's because Go and C++ are profoundly different philosophically.

> C++ is about having it all there at your fingertips. I found this quote on a C++11 FAQ:

> The range of abstractions that C++ can express elegantly, flexibly, and at zero costs compared to hand-crafted specialized code has greatly increased.

> That way of thinking just isn't the way Go operates. Zero cost isn't a goal, at least not zero CPU cost. Go's claim is that minimizing programmer effort is a more important consideration.

If you want to compare them on use cases, Go is far too slow and memory hungry to be used in most domains where C++ is actually necessary. That is, for any C++ program that could be re-written in Go, you could also re-write it in Java or C# or Haskell, bar a few problems around startup times and binary sizes.

And that is what has been seen, again as the post points out: C++ programmers are not switching to Go. Ruby and Python and (Java and C#) programmers are.

Also, the designers of C++ have never made any effort to think about how easy the language is to learn, unlike the designers of Go, Java and C#. In fact, all of these languages share a common heritage: they are all designed as answers to C++, in slightly different ways.

> That is, for any C++ program that could be re-written in Go, you could also re-write it in Java or C# or Haskell, bar a few problems around startup times and binary sizes.

Nearly any program can be written any language. I can write in functional programming using Ruby, but why on earth would I do that when Haskell is "out of the box" useful for an application where functional programming makes the most sense.

> Ruby and Python and (Java and C#) programmers are.

Dynamic, object orientated based programmers are switching to Go when the use case suits. My understanding is that the syntax and philosophies are much more aligned to people of those backgrounds (Erlang -> Elixir is a great example of this) and gives them access to a lower-level language without having to learn many of the common more "computer sciency" things that are involved with those languages (C++/C).

> Nearly any program can be written any language. I can write in functional programming using Ruby, but why on earth would I do that when Haskell is "out of the box" useful for an application where functional programming makes the most sense.

That's only true in theory. In practice, you can't write a program that has soft realtime constraints for example (e.g. a game engine) in Go or Java, you have to write it in C++ or C or maybe Rust. This is true in general when you need utmost performance: while in general it's easier to write the same functionality in Go or Haskell or Java than in C++, the opposite is true when you need to extract as much performance as possible: it becomes easier to work in C or C++ or Rust than in Go or Haskell or Java (of course, this is a generalization; there are exceptions, though the rule holds pretty well overall).

> My understanding is that the syntax and philosophies are much more aligned to people of those backgrounds (Erlang -> Elixir is a great example of this) and gives them access to a lower-level language without having to learn many of the common more "computer sciency" things that are involved with those languages (C++/C).

Yes, because Go is is much closer to this paradigm than to the the paradigm of (Modern) C++. The only programming languages whose vision is similar to C++'s in my opinion are Rust and Common Lisp (even though of course Common Lisp is applicable to different hardware constraints, it being garbage collected and dynamic, it still has a very similar philosophy at its core).

>This is what having a huge toolbox causes. Some people are going to write code using channels, me others will use async.

I don't know if this is a problem. Redundancy is good. If simple languages ruled, we would all be speaking Esperanto.

>Some people will use features that others don't care about. I end up having this argument with product managers who insist that because most people only use 60% of the functionality of a product, we don't need to implement the remaining 40%. You need more than one way of doing the same thing.

On the contrary, every instance where there is more than one way to do something is a failure of the language. It's OK, all languages have failures, but the ideal is pretty clearly a set of precisely orthogonal features, where there is neither repetition nor exception.

I am pretty sure I have read something similar to "Go is easy" a multitude of times.

We solve that with communication to use a to the team well known subset of the language and internal trainings if we see potential helpful features.

But for most programmers, easy outweighs simple in the hierarchy of values.

Which is a problem. (Though, i will say i think go is neither easy nor simple, but i believe that is an unpopular opinion here at HN)

Simple > easy should be common sense for anyone who ever worked in a team. Code is written once and read many times (and usually not by the author).

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