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Comment by nassimsoftware | Hacker News Reader

The thing with Go is that I find the syntax very ugly to look at however it is so convenient to install, run, deploy, make performant applications.

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I'm not a Go fan but the language to me looks very readable and clean. However in my opinion syntax is usually not that important, you can and will get used to anything

The thing that gets me is how time is handled, enums, no sets, no way to make variables final, the "make" syntax, could probably go on

why do you find it ugly?

One for me is the "if err" everywhere lol, but i like how it has great ecosystem like nodejs

I have mixed feelings about the error handling.

It is kind of boilerplatey, but I find myself stopping to consider how best to manage an error vs languages with exceptions.

Try Result + combinators + ? operator.

https://learning-rust.github.io/docs/e6.combinators.html

https://learning-rust.github.io/docs/e5.error_and_none_propa...

I find the ecosystem lacking. The Go community seems to have settled on "Use the standard library" which is pretty unsatisfying unless you're engaged in a specific range of web-related tasks.

Edit: I left out "engaged in" previously.

An example :

  for _, a := range albums {
        if a.ID == id {

            c.IndentedJSON(http.StatusOK, a)

            return

        }

  }

is ugly compared to a much more readable :

  for a in albums:

     if a.ID == id:

         // the rest of the code

  albums = append(albums, newAlbum)

is ugly compared to

  albums.append(newAlbum)

Edit : I have trouble formatting the code. How do you do this on HN ?` doesn't seem to work.

Edit 2 : Fixed the formatting issue.

Superficial. You prefer no braces, no underscores, and no colon. Typing is cheap. I don't mind 'em. Your second example has more implied than syntactical gripes.

    albums = append(albums, newAlbum)

implies immutability. I like that. The latter does not. I don't like that. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Correct, they were asked their opinion about why they think it's ugly, they gave it

True. I seemed to have missed that and came off a tad rude doing so. Part of my opinion is now in the mix. :-)

> implies immutability.

Except that implication is incorrect -- slices are mutable.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html:

  What kind of formatting can you use in comments?

  http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc:

Text after a blank line that is indented by two or more spaces is reproduced verbatim. (This is intended for code.)

Yeah, I find the “xs = append(xs, x)”, or for concat, “xs = append(xs, ys...)” supremely ugly. Or, its time module: you can write 3 * time.Second, which is reasonable enough, but when you have a variable instead of constant literal, you need to write time.Duration(x) * time.Second — entire expression represents the time interval of 3 seconds, but the “time.Duration(x)” component of it makes no sense at all in isolation - it’s just horrible API design. Also, its time zone API is atrocious too: it doesn’t distinguish absolute timestamps from local (wall clock) time on the type level.

Saddest part is that it’s actually pretty good language at getting things done, you just have to hold your nose and pretend it was invented in early 1980s, before the industry figured out good, clean solutions to many problems, and converged on them. Otherwise, to think that someone thought nil (that is, not empty) arrays, or returning value/error as pair instead of tagged result union, or lack of generics, is a good idea on 2000s, is just unconscionable.

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