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Comment by mjw_byrne | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps I'm a dinosaur but I don't like the range-over-function addition. I don't think it adds enough convenience to justify the complexity it adds to the language, and the functional style feels at odds with Go's explicit, imperative (albeit verbose) and feature-lean style, which I think was one of its major strengths.

For the same reason I think the range-over-integer feature is a misstep. Go's lean feature set and minimal mental load have always been major strengths and differentiators of the language.

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So at the moment this feature is optional / experimental and opt-in; if they make it standard on, I hope they add an opt-out mechanism of sorts, so that developers are discouraged to use it if it's not commonplace.

I find that one big problem with software developers is keeping developers from adding complexity, or "flexing". Especially developers earlier in their career, present company included, tend to overcomplicate a solution instead of just solve the problem in a straightforward albeit inelegant and wordy fashion and move on.

Yep, one of the big wins for Go was preventing this by just not supporting complicated, "clever" code. It doesn't have a ternary expression, "i++" is not an rvalue, you cannot pack a huge amount of work into a single line, you can't overload operators or even functions and so on.

The opposite extreme is arguably C++, which I personally quite like (probably because I use it only for solo projects and don't try to collaborate with anyone), but I can't deny that it's an awkward, gnarly monster of a language. It'd be awful to see Go end up like that.

I also think this feature feels premature. Ideally, it should be introduced after lambdas and generic parameter packs. The Generics support in Golang is not sophisticated enough to support this at the moment leading to the strangely imposed limitations

> Ideally, it should be introduced after lambdas

Like syntactic sugar over `func`? Since func can already be anonymous and passed around just fine, I don't expect them to add additional syntax for functions.

I'm ambivalent as well. It doesn't even save lines of code compared to passing an inline function.

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