I think that's what Go was designed for, as a language. To be readable, usable. It's uncaring for your personal programming philosophies. I think that's why it's been successful.
Go's philosophy (which clearly flows from its creators being C-enthusiasts) is that the only thing that matters for reading, writing, and understanding a program is what it concretely does, i.e. what structures are created, where values are stored, how computations are performed etc. If that's also your philosophy, then of course it's going to jive with you.
But plenty of people also have different philosophies. Maybe you think the main thing that's important in crafting programs is developing a rich domain vocabulary that expresses concepts and how they interact. Maybe you think that what's important is formal proof of both logical and concrete correctness. In those cases, Go's rigorous opposition to abstraction (coming from its philosophy that what's important is concrete operations) will probably irritate and slow you down.
I couldn't say exactly why it got popular. I'd guess that some significant segment of programmers also share its philosophy, but I have no evidence to back that up. Certainly any reasonably uncontroversial language with a large suite of libraries backed by Google is bound to have some level of popularity.
Probably because it has the backing of Google.
You can do the same work in Java but you can't statically link the JVM. You can sort of do these in Python, but the compiler story is murky at best, and the language isn't as type safe.
That's not quite accurate; there is a runtime, it just gets statically linked into the binary instead of needing to be externally installed
In particular, I don't understand how Go is more Java-like than Dart.
Feature | Java | Dart | Go
-------------------+------+------+----
jit compilation | yes | yes | no
inheritance | yes | yes | no
classes | yes | yes | no
nominal subtyping | yes | yes | no
native binaries | no | no | yes
static artifact[0] | no | no | yes
static typing | yes | opt | no
value types | no | no | yes
[0]: For sanity's sake, we'll assume this means "are static artifacts common/default" and not "is it technically possible to produce a static artifact" because for some sufficiently broad definition of static artifact the answer can be yes for any language (e.g., Docker images).
There is a forest full of code hiding a trees worth of business logic, always.
Go is one of the least expressive languages I've ever used.
That is by design, and when it comes to "programming in the large" - a winning formula. I keep repeating this response: I worked on a Perl codebase with a medium-sized team. Perl is very expressive, and my teammates did not hold back. I can tell you that is a nightmare to debug or add a new edgecase to a "clever" Perl 1-liner, usually it involved making the code "less expressive". So, I'll take Go over the more expressive languages in a team setting any day.
My needs are pretty basic: I like code that is easy to understand and easy to change more than writing code that leaves a smug smile on my face. I read more code than I write, so YMMV.
The fewer surprises, the better for me, and so far, the collaborative codebases I've encountered the least number of surprises have consistently been in Go (the other languages I've been paid to work with are Javascript, Perl, Python, Java, and Scala).
But we still have to write code that these people understand. It makes no damn sense.
Sometimes, sure, people write horribly complex code, but sometimes it's just developers who have stopped learning. They see something that isn't immediately familiar and discard it as too complex and make no attempt at trying to learn.
What I don't get is why we have to pander to these people.
Huh? What do you consider syntactic bureaucracy? Go has like 25 keywords and no sigils -- the least "syntactically bureaucratic" language I'm aware of!
> Go is one of the least expressive languages I've ever used.
This is definitely true. Of course expressiveness is not strictly a virtue!
I would assume "amount of syntax required to express a given concept," with the use of the word "bureaucracy" implying that some concepts require too much syntax relative to their complexity (something that depends on your values). The classic example being mapping over a slice.
Here's some Rust code
pub fn read(&self) -> u64 {
self.counts.values().fold(0, |acc, x| acc + x)
}
func (w *Whatever) Read() uint64 {
var total uint64
for _, v := range w.values {
total += v
}
return total
}
YMMV, of course. None of this is objective.
Similarly, even though I'm not a big fan of Rust, I would personally prefer to encounter the Rust snippet. The way I read code, I'm already building up mental models of things in my head, so adding more (e.g. what fold is) isn't that big of a deal to me. I think I'm a person who is able to look at a function call and not have the desire to dig into its source, though, which I don't think is the way everybody (and most certainly not the designers of Go) feels. Plus once I understand the concept, even if it's a lot less universally applicable than fold, I can reuse my understanding of it throughout the system and possibly throughout multiple systems.
Like you said, I think this is largely a subjective thing. I just find it objectionable when people, on either side of the fence, come in and say "abstracting over concepts and possibly making them first class is always better" or "...always worse."
Go doesn't particularly value readability or usability. For example, the short variable name convention makes it harder to read code you're unfamiliar with, and there are a number of noticeable usability shortcomings, some of which are mentioned in the article.
I think Go's design goals were really to (1) reduce compilation time, which explains why Go has human programmers do work that compilers do in other languages, (2) be statically typed and compiled, so you can use it conveniently for microservices, and (3) have syntax somewhat similar to Python.
I think of Go as the successor to Java. Go is to Python as Java was to C++. That, plus the integration with many libraries is why it's taken off in some niches.