| ▲ | jchw 2 days ago | |
> 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. | ||