Comment by TheDong | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheDong | Hacker News Reader

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> P.s. complex, difficult to understand languages incur more bugs then simple ones, even with additional safety.

Do you have any info on this? My understanding of this has been that some types of complexity make code worse, and other types make code better. For example, ruby's metaprogramming has been a source of bugs because of it's complexity.

On the other hand, haskell is "complex and difficult" in terms of having a powerful type system. In my personal experience, I've found that haskell code has far fewer bugs than go code, and a large fraction of the bugs I encounter in go would not have been written in haskell or rust, in a language with a more powerful type system.

Do you have any info on this link between "complexity" and bugs?

> Go is successful [...]

That's unrelated to whether it has systematic problems. As is much of your post to be honest. Like, yeah, javascript is successful. Bash is successful. No one will argue that those languages don't have systematic problems.

The parent poster wasn't saying no one uses go, but that people use go despite its systematic problems, and tbh your comment mostly doesn't argue against that thesis, just arguing that it's successful. Which sure, yes, it is, that's not really related to the parent comment's claim that it's a poorly designed language.

> Do you have any info on this?

There have been some studies, and while all methodologies have tradeoff's go and clojure sit near the bottom of this list in bugs/committ: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.10220.pdf

Which is fascinating because they are very different languages whose unifying theme is simplicity.

But this actually fits well if you know another important fact: bugs occur along organizational lines. https://augustl.com/blog/2019/best_bug_predictor_is_organiza... If you've been around long enough, you realize a lot, if not most bugs, come from not understanding someone else's code. Type systems arn't going to help you, when you don't understand what the code they are "protecting" is doing.

> The parent poster wasn't saying no one uses go, but that people use go despite its systematic problems, and tbh your comment mostly doesn't argue against that thesis, just arguing that it's successful

But if go has so many problems why do people use it? Javascript, bash, and go have a unifying trait. They are useful, they solve a problem. But unlike javascript and bash, go wasn't and isn't integrated anywhere. No ecosystem forced people into go. They choose it, writ large. Why? Well because languages are more than there type systems.

> all methodologies have tradeoff's go and clojure sit near the bottom of this list in bugs/committ: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.10220.pdf

You have linked a study which, if you read the abstract, effectively claims "we tried to reproduce a study about bugs-by-programming-language, and could not. We have concluded their methodology was flawed".

I can't find information in your linked source that support anything about type-system complexity resulting in more bugs.

> But if go has so many problems why do people use it?

If candy is bad for your health, why do people eat it? Surely people eating candy is proof it's good for your health. That's the argument you're making here.

We can show candy is bad for your health, and the comment you originally replied to provided a mix of reasons why they saw go as having problems and ignoring programming research. All of those are more evidence than what you've replied with, which is essentially "but go is popular", entirely ignoring their concrete points.

Anyway, if people choosing a language is proof that a language doesn't have problems, that surely means PHP, Java, python, C, etc have fewer problems than Go since they all are used much more than it.

Again, a language being good and people using it are not necessarily related. People eat candy despite it being bad for them. People code in Go despite it being designed like "C, but with GC"

Perhaps rob pike said it best:

> The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt

As rob pike so clearly said, perhaps go is successful because it is intentionally a poorly designed language, intentionally one that eschews programming research in order to appeal to python programmers.

Rob Pike did not "clearly say" anything of the kind. You are badly distorting what he said. Maybe try reading it again without bias?

As for the rest of your post, you dismiss the study as flawed. Fine. But most of the rest is your candy analogy, which is also flawed. One could just as easily say that people like you like... whatever languages you like... in the same way that people like cocaine, because it makes them feel smarter than everyone else. Such "proof by analogy" doesn't say anything meaningful or arguable.

The one other thing you said is that "the language being good" and "being used" are two different things. But I have a different view of programmers than you seem to. They aren't toddlers with no self-control reaching for what's bad for them (or drug addicts either, in my flawed analogy). Programmers use languages because, despite their flaws, the languages are still better for their use case than the alternatives. You have to judge a language as a whole package - syntax, semantics, build-in libraries, third-party libraries, ability to find people who know it, help available on Stack Overflow, all of it. Go (and PHP and Java and C/C++) have significant market share because, for significant classes of problems, they still are better than the available alternatives.

I trust the people actually building stuff. They are the hardest people to fool.

> That's unrelated to whether it has systematic problems. As is much of your post to be honest. Like, yeah, javascript is successful. Bash is successful. No one will argue that those languages don't have systematic problems.

Right, bash and js have pretty significant problems, but they remain popular because they were developed as exclusive languages for platforms which became wildly popular; essentially they benefit from monopolies and network effects in a way that Go never has. The fact that Go is a popular language and still rapidly growing indicates that its issues are relatively minor compared with its advantages over other candidates (e.g., Haskell).

> On the other hand, haskell is "complex and difficult" in terms of having a powerful type system. In my personal experience, I've found that haskell code has far fewer bugs than go code, and a large fraction of the bugs I encounter in go would not have been written in haskell or rust, in a language with a more powerful type system.

Granted, but in my experience those languages trade off a lot of productivity in order to reduce bugs, and that leaves me a whole lot of time to debug Go programs and achieve a similar degree of correctness. Moreover, I often spend so much of my energy thinking about the type system in Rust/Haskell that I make silly mistakes that the type system doesn't catch (I've written a static site generator in Go and then in Rust, and I wrote a bunch of URL/filepath handling bugs in the Rust version that weren't present in the Go version--despite the benefit of hindsight--because I was focusing so much on the type system). Rust also makes it a lot more painful to create and use new integer types compared to Go (e.g., you have to define a ton of traits and even then you still have to wrap integer literals in MyIntegerType::new(0) and so on), so I see a lot of code that just passes around u64s as identifiers for different resource types and it's super easy to use the wrong u64 to index into the wrong resource collection.

I'm not saying that Rust results in more bugs on balance (I don't think it does) but that Go wins overall for most ordinary application code (but not for systems code, or high performance code, or real time / mission critical code).

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