Hacker News Reader

Comment by YesThatTom2 | Hacker News Reader

Have you heard of the “MVP then iterate” concept?

It only applies when not advocating against proven language features.

Yeah. It is extremely frustrating when a whole community of people keep telling you "you are dumb for telling us you need this feature" and then you later watch that community celebrate the addition of that feature when the narrative changes and they finally realize what the feature was actually for. (FWIW: I don't care enough about Go to know the status / history of this feature; I am just commenting on this discussion.)

One ridiculous example I remember (and which tends to surprise people who have a more limited context of the past): MySQL seriously used to have a page of their documentation dedicated to why views were a bad idea and there was a good reason why their database hadn't implemented them. Of course, they eventually realized why people wanted them, so they are both now implemented and the page telling you why you shouldn't use them is gone.

So Go has two GC knobs now. I think it still plays to the ethos of minimalism and restraint.

I didn't know about the anti-view sentiment. I do remember them arguing against any need of foreign keys at all, then after they implemented them poorly arguing about limiting their use as they were just "useless overhead". Full transaction safety (aka ACID) was "for banks" not the rest of us. Silently truncating input was de rigueur, blissfully accepting 'Mary had a little lamb' into an integer column happily stored 0, and handling concurrent transactions with MyISAM? Fuhgeddaboutit.

The gotchas listed here (https://sql-info.de/mysql/gotchas.html) have all now been addressed, but I still have a bitter taste from that era and avoid MySQL to this day when I can. I feel the same way about PHP despite the improvements—let's face it—the developers were forced to take. (https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/)

Together they made an unholy alliance whose ecosystem's sole reason for existence seemed to be maximizing the production of high severity CVEs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com