Opportunity

[Paulo Pinto]

On Tuesday, 9 April 2013 at 08:17:40 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Mon, 2013-04-08 at 23:51 +0200, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> […]
>> Lets not forget the lack of generics, the religious view 
>> against dynamic linking and errors for unused variables and 
>> imports.
>
> OK so every language has it's religious side: Go's obsession 
> for static
> linking is indeed a problem and cgo is not really the solution.

I already advocated in go-nuts that an import mechanism similar 
to Object Pascal, D and many others makes more sense, to no avail.

>
> Another religious element is that the language is tiny (which I 
> find
> good), and distributed version control for imports is included 
> in the
> language (which I think is brilliant). I want this is C++, D, 
> Java,
> Groovy, Python, Kotlin, Ceylon, Scala. etc., etc. Why are 21st 
> century
> languages still not connected to 21st century version control? 
> For me,
> Go has introduced so seriously sane innovation here (*).


First, not all enterprise developers happen to live in GitHub 
land or
the other source control urls they support.

Second, as nice as it may be, it has issues with versioning, 
branching and security access for the said URLs, which they don't 
seem willing to fix.

In the enterprise world not everyone compiles from source 
everything.

This raises issues with their approaches.

>
> I am not a fan of the unused variables and imports being 
> errors, but I
> can live with that. What I can't live with is the fascism of 
> gofmt. Yet
> I do :-(
>
> I have yet to find anyone who can tell me why Go must have 
> generics with
> a cogent argument that makes sense to me. OK so C++ has 
> generics;
> templates, how wonderful. Java has generics, and type erasure, 
> great.
> Scala, Ceylon and Kotlin have huge infrastructure to reify 
> generics on a
> platform with unreified generics. At least C# got that right.

Performance and avoiding to write casts everywhere in otherwise 
generic code.

I find really unfortunate that most people seem to always focus 
on generics in the Java world, when almost every single static 
language has some model of generics.

> Why is the
> Go idea of total separation of state and behaviour not a good
> experiment, after all JavaScript, Python, etc. have shown this 
> works
> even without static type checking.

Dynamic languages are generic by nature, of course they don't 
need generics.