Gary Willoughby: "Why Go's design is a disservice to intelligent programmers"

[via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Thursday, 26 March 2015 at 00:08:28 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
> On Wednesday, 25 March 2015 at 22:30:15 UTC, Ola Fosheim 
> Grøstad wrote:
>> Go has stability, is production ready and has an ecosystem 
>> with commercial value.
>
> You could say the same things about Cobol or PHP, but that 
> doesn't mean the languages themselves should be free from 
> criticism.

There is a difference between claiming that language A makes this 
and that difficult and claiming that language B is better than A. 
To claim the latter you need to look at comparable larger real 
world programs and how it fares regarding scaling and 
maintainability issues.

> My opinion of Go was very much consistent with the article. It 
> doesn't mean much to me to have a stable language that I don't 
> want to use. His points are valid.

I could easily make similar points about D and it's somewhat 
messed up type system, syntax and libraries. It would be quite 
easy to convincingly claim that C++/Go/Python are a better 
languages than D.

The Go designers keep the language small and polish it to 
production quality before moving on with new features. Some of 
the Go designers also have acknowledged that exceptions and 
generics can be useful, but that they don't want to add features 
until they know it is the right thing to do and how to go about 
it.

If you aren't making a research language (and D most certainly 
would fail in that arena) the only thing that matters is how it 
fares in a production setting by programmers who do full time 
programming in the language.