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Comment by kylecazar | Hacker News Reader

Go? Archaic? I suppose you are referring to the paradigm it employs...

Author here. Yeah, the Go language feels very archaic when using more modern languages. Some things I miss when I use Go: immutability as a default, monadic error handling, type classes, higher-kinded types, high-level collection operations (map, flatmap, filter, etc), ADTs, extensive pattern matching, expression-orientedness, and explicit null handling.

Guess that’s why kubernetes and so many other CNCF projects were written in Go.

It’s archaic enough that everyone can get things done instead of worrying about esoteric new features.

Kubernetes was prototyped in Java and rewritten in Go due to Go bias of some team members, which forced a rewrite into Go.

Source: A couple of talks at FOSDEM.

Don't attribute to technology the outcome of political decisions.

I also used to get things done in TASM.

Have you stopped to consider why those team members had a bias towards Go? Maybe it’s for a reason.

Maybe the people behind Istio, InfluxDB, Docker, Traefik, Terraform, etc also chose the “archaic” Go for “political reasons”.

Some of the world's most incredible software is written in C and JavaScript and both are languages with incredible deficiencies from a language design standpoint. This doesn't take away from the software that was written in them.

You're assuming that tech is a meritocracy (it very much is not).

You're implying that if a tool is archaic, things cannot be done with it (also not true).

You're also explicitly saying that the features James mentioned are esoteric, which is easily disproven by the fact that many mainstream languages have them nowadays.

Maybe the author isn't a fan of explicit pointers? Because yeah, though it's obviously c-like (as is Java), I can't think of anything else one might consider archaic that isn't also in the java language or virtual machine.

There are sooo many nice language features that have proven themselves over the last 3-4 decades and have become popular but are missing from Go that I think archaic is appropriate.

There's archaic and there's minimalist, and they're definitely not the same. Languages with buckets of features have steeper and longer learning curves, and if they're still actively developed, what you do learn may not last long.

Go is what I'd call minimalist. COBOL or fortran are what I'd call archaic.

Why does Go need explicit pointers?

It’s less about need and more that it’s a feature to help you more easily understand your memory allocations and when you are getting a reference to something vs a copy

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