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Comment by booleandilemma | Hacker News Reader

I like Go, but its insistence on not permitting unused imports and unused variables make it unsuitable for scripting, imo.

For scripting I want something that I can be fast and messy in. Go is the opposite of that.

It's ok, a language doesn't have to be good at everything.

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There should totally be a compiler flag to not require those

Maybe there could be a whole class of things that are like errors, but not as severe, and flags that deal with them as a group! We could call them "warnings"

Oh you mean things that are ignored in every situation ever

If you choose to do that with warnings, that's your prerogative. I pretty much take the opposite approach personally; before putting code into review (or merging, if it's a personal project with no reviewers), every warning is inspected and I decide whether to fix it by changing the code not to generate it or manually suppress it only in that specific location. 99% of the time the warning is a sign of something actually wrong, but the 1% where I know that I actually don't care (and the extremely frequent occurrences when I don't while in the development part of the cycle and not finished with the implementation), it's much better to not have it completely block me.

I agree. When I am scripting, I want to have quick feed back loop. You can't really do that with Go because it doesn't have as good introspection and debugging capabilities as a scripting language like Ruby and doesn't have exceptions, which means that error handling is more verbose than necessary.

Also, I like being able to make modifications on the fly, so doing something in Ruby, I can just open the file make adjustments and I am done. With Go, I have to compile it and move it back into my path which is really tedious.

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