> so.. Haskell and Scala? Those would be the top two that come to mind for me when someone says "highly 'logical' and 'compose well'", "having sum types", 'more expressive', etc.
I wrote Scala for years - it might be a bit too complicated but overall pretty decent, but I hear good things about Scala 3. I think the ML's, of which it takes inspiration from, are probably a better match. OCaml (EDIT: or F# as another comment mentioned) for instance is a pretty nice balance.
Haskell is very nice and I think qualifies except that it is pretty hard core purely functional with no punches pulled (unlike ML), so is foreign enough for most people not to be deemed a candidate.
I like Rust probably best atm as it is "imperative but with a functional flair", but doesn't qualify as easy I don't think, but is definitely highly logical and composes very well (even if obviously not finished yet).
> I've heard they're great languages (haven't used them much myself), but I probably wouldn't choose them for say an early-stage startup. Go's value is in being a mundane, repetitive, boring language. It makes it easy for any random kid to dive into an existing code base and become productive, that can be super valuable.
I would probably agree on the novice programmer and picking up Go quickly which is arguably the prime feature of Go. I just question the quality of that code, and honestly, don't feel Go is nearly as easy as touted. It is simple for sure, but not always easy. I always had to look up simple things like those magic comment compiler directives and is that interface{} param a pointer or a pointer to a pointer? I just remember the lack of expressiveness actually causing real world confusion (for me at least).
> There's a gradient of programming languages where one side is "has a single expression for exactly your problem, a single unique expression you've never heard of exists to solve every possible problem" and the other is "requires thousands of expressions to express your problem, but only a thousand are available" - or something like that.
While true, I would argue we have found a small amount of constructs that fit well 80% of the time, and is demonstrability better than half the constructs that fit well 40% of the time. Trying to solve every problem with a new construct is not worth it, but nor is the opposite extreme IMO.
> My point? There's no perfect language, yet people are always trying to find one. It's OK if you don't like Go and prefer another language. A real devil / tradeoff is the prohibition of using languages that do not conform with past (company) choices.
Honestly not sure we've found the ideal language yet, and agree there is subjectivity and trade offs at about every turn. In fact, the only thing I'm certain of is that Go missed what I would look for in just about every category except a few (but I agree it is easy to learn, but does it matter if you can't write good code with it?). That said, very intelligent and respected people disagree with me, so to each their own.