I don't find go readable in the slightest, the syntactic bureaucracy is just too high.
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.
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."