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Yes! And people will defend this awful language!

I don't go that far. Mistakes were made, but golang has great properties as well.

I'm just amazed that, given that golang's inception is relatively recent, somehow this old lesson had not been learned by the designers. Accomplished and learned people created this language. How did that happen?

Go's design is laser focused on fast compile times at the expense of everything else.

Which is crazy. Even at Google scale the bottleneck to delivery is human reasoning about code changes, not so much build times.

While it's true that fast compilation was probably the primary asperation of golang's design, it wasn't the only concern, and there is nothing about eliminating nullability that would have compromised compile time. So I'm left to imagine that they just didn't know.

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