Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

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> The speed of development is far better than any other language I've experienced.

No, it isn't. Here's the proof: someone has said exactly that about, and I'm really not kidding, every newly popular language over the last 20 years. They said it about Java. About Python. About Ruby, and CoffeeScript and Clojure and Haskell and...

Yet the Great Leap Forward in programming productivity hasn't arrived. And Go won't bring it either.

Go no doubt improves your speed of coding. And being a new and different toolbox it's more fun, so it makes your coding more engaging. You "feel" more productive. But your hard bugs are still hard. And your maintenance hassles are still hassles. And your bad designs are still bad. That stuff is what takes time, not banging out your code.

Programming languages can make the easy stuff easy. They can't fix our own stupidity.

(To be clear: I'm not saying Go is bad, it actually looks like a ton of fun to me, though I haven't had the chance to really kick the tires yet. But don't attribute to it properties it doesn't have.)

    > someone has said exactly that about, and I'm really not 
    > kidding, every newly popular language over the last 20 
    > years.

That's probably true, and I grok your point, but pretty much everyone who's using Go in a production environment cites speed of development among the major, top-N reasons they're using the language. Past a certain threshold, there's something there that can't be hand-waved away.

    > Programming languages can make the easy stuff easy. 
    > They can't fix our own stupidity.

One of the neat things about Go, in my opinion, is that it converts a lot of "hard stuff" to "easy stuff", especially in the domain of concurrency, simply by the nature of its idioms.

Sure, but again, recognize that your points are all the same stuff we've already heard. Moving from C++ to Java was like that (especially in the domain of debugging). Moving from PHP to Ruby was like that (especially in the domain of reuse). And these points were universally recognized by everyone writing Java or Ruby, and they weren't wrong.

And you aren't wrong. Go has made you more productive, and I don't argue with that. But how much of that is Go and how much of that is simply you becoming better after being tickled by your new toy?

Back the clock up to the '98 C++/PHP world, and you'll see all the same bad software. It's not that nothing has improved, but the improvements are mild. People "wrote code" really fast back then too, and that code was clean, and just like back then people spend most of their time evolving that now-much-less-clean code to work in new design domains. And that's the stuff that has barely changed at all.

So you're not saying that everyone was wrong when they claimed they were more productive in C++/Java/Scala than in C/C++/Java?

We're using modern languages to build things that were difficult/impossible in older languages. Sure, the 1998 PHP world looks primitive, and the actual code may be bad, but I think it was miles ahead of the 1988 COBOL world.

I would have thought that each language brought more suitable tools to the jobs at the time, and people were more productive. I feel more productive in Go now than I ever have. It's not a factor of 10, but it's noticeable. Yes it may be that it's new and I enjoy it so I'm more productive, but given the language's designers' rock-hard stance on introducing complexity, I am confident in a frustration-reduced experience in Go for the foreseeable future.

Also, if this increase in productivity is just due to learning a new language, I think that's as good a reason as any to learn it :)

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