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> People tend to forget that Golang was created on purpose for poor programmers.

Nobody is forgetting that quote. Trust me, it has been repeated a lot[1].

That said, I think this framing of the issue really needs to die. Rob Pike is saying they're "not researchers", that they're "typically fairly young", not that they're poor programmers. Notice that in the list of languages they may have learned, "C or C++" is present. The idea is not that Go is designed for people who can't possibly write C++.

This framing also implies that the language being better for n00bs means that it's also necessarily worse for everyone else. There are some tradeoffs where this is a defensible position, but I think on the whole it's just not generally true. A good example is preferring composition over inheritance: I think the former is generally more understandable and a lot of people actually contort C++ to use it this way too. (For example, in some codebases, only pure abstract base classes are ever inherited; everything else is final.)

When I see this quote repeated as if it implies that Go is just generally designed for bad programmers, I feel like it reads like flamebait. The real answer is that it was designed to be so easy that any idiot can use it. Or in other words, Go is very grug-brained[2].

To each their own, but it's been over 10 years since that quote and Go has evolved a lot. Is it perhaps time to put it to rest and stop reading into it so much?

[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... - though I'm sure it has been paraphrased and linked even more than this.

[2]: https://grugbrain.dev/

> People tend to forget that Golang was created on purpose for poor programmers.

Poor programmers by Google's standards. I would argue the vast majority of programmers, even those outside of Google, don't want to be language researches, have no desire to be a language wonk, but want to build software to solve their and their companies problems. I read that quote and think it means that Golang is the only language the vast majority of programmers should be using unless they are researchers, not as a some veiled put down.

If it was created on purpose for poor programmers, it seems to have been created to enable poor programmers to write the poor code they wanted to write, instead of making it impossible for poor programmers to write any code.

I guess that's the difference, if you want code, no matter the quality, you have one choice, if you want code that's correct, you have another.

You can call us poor programmers if that boosts your ego. The industry is still built upon people who can build fast. Go allows that and so does Javascript. You might not like it but that's what is earning most people their bread nowadays.

I don’t think this implies it can’t be the right tool for the job, even when everyone on the team is a good programmer.

I don’t think it implies that you can’t write good programs in it.

> People tend to forget that Golang was created on purpose for poor programmers.

Ergo: if you actually like it, you must not be that great a developer.

> People tend to forget that Golang was created on purpose for poor programmers.

The money shot....