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Comment by AlexandrB | Hacker News Reader

> Simplicity and explicitness are paramount when collaborating.

So is succinctness (most people can't speed read code). The examples he gives make Go look anything but succinct.

That's because he's not a very good Go programmer, which is not surprising since he's clearly far too intelligent to use Go.

At a certain point succinctness does more harm than good. Go captures nearly all of the sense of python's early values (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/), without requiring all that much more in the way of boilerplate. So you have to if-check an error value here and there, no big deal. You should be handling errors anyway.

If Haskell's succinctness level is 1, then I would rate python's at 2, go's at 4, and java's at 20.

Presumably, that rating scales has higher numbers meaning less succinctness? Because otherwise the order of the numbers (much less there relative values) doesn't make any sense, even though that's kind of the opposite of what you'd expect of a "succinctness level".

It's a linear scaling factor for how many lines of code I tend to take to express the same medium-sized program across these languages.

Nonsense. On moderate-large codebases Go is not 5x more expressive/succinct than Java. Maybe 1.5x if you are lucky.

Please point me to the large codebase your ported from Java to Go -- if you don't have actual data, just two people making up idiotic numbers let me get involved.

Go is 185175% better than Java and 8165% better than Haskell -- or making up numbers just makes us all look like goddamn idiots.

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