![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(From the discussion on an article on Google Plus)
There are always different opinions about a programming language. IMO it is a matter not just of personal taste, but also of the personal balance of priorities you have. For instance, if you particularly want terseness, freedom of expression, and lots of pragmatic shortcuts, Perl is just the thing. If you need real type safety and a firm grip on the module interfaces for a large team, Java or Ada may be the right thing. (I happen to like both, BTW.)
For me, Go may have just the right balance of type safety, pragmatic shortcuts (partly implicit strong typing! automatic memory management!), good performance, and powerful language features (closures! channels! interfaces! goroutines! multiple values!).
I lean to the stricter side of programming, such that I see it as a weakness of, say, Python or Ruby that variables do not have to be declared explicitly. Doing it with a simple ":=" like in Go, on the other hand, is so elegant I could squeak!
In a similar vein I am not a friend of the implicit string<->number equivalence that has become so popular since Perl (I guess) opened that particular box. I am very happy that Go does not follow that practice, but can, apparently, provide well-controlled implicit conversions where they are useful.
C has served me well for nearly a quarter of a century, in more than just the technical sense, and I still like it. But many things are so tedious to do in C. Implementing complex data structures, handling memory management, and constantly aiming carefully for the space between the toes takes, after an initial rush in the first years, much of the fun from programming and is quite tiring in the end.
Go may be just the thing to avoid many of C's tediousnesses, while keeping most of C's expressive power plus quite some of its own, and give me back the fun I have been missing.
http://golang.org/
Update: In the meantime I have learned that Go does no implicit conversion between strings and integers, but instead uses a common interface for print formatting, which is even better.
Update of the update: Later I learned that there is not (and cannot be) one common interface for print formatting implemented by all types and objects, but the formatter code looks at the value via reflection to decide how it should be formatted. There is built-in knowledge for simple types, an interface that can be used for those struct types that implement it, and generic code to explore other struct types via reflection.
There are always different opinions about a programming language. IMO it is a matter not just of personal taste, but also of the personal balance of priorities you have. For instance, if you particularly want terseness, freedom of expression, and lots of pragmatic shortcuts, Perl is just the thing. If you need real type safety and a firm grip on the module interfaces for a large team, Java or Ada may be the right thing. (I happen to like both, BTW.)
For me, Go may have just the right balance of type safety, pragmatic shortcuts (partly implicit strong typing! automatic memory management!), good performance, and powerful language features (closures! channels! interfaces! goroutines! multiple values!).
I lean to the stricter side of programming, such that I see it as a weakness of, say, Python or Ruby that variables do not have to be declared explicitly. Doing it with a simple ":=" like in Go, on the other hand, is so elegant I could squeak!
In a similar vein I am not a friend of the implicit string<->number equivalence that has become so popular since Perl (I guess) opened that particular box. I am very happy that Go does not follow that practice, but can, apparently, provide well-controlled implicit conversions where they are useful.
C has served me well for nearly a quarter of a century, in more than just the technical sense, and I still like it. But many things are so tedious to do in C. Implementing complex data structures, handling memory management, and constantly aiming carefully for the space between the toes takes, after an initial rush in the first years, much of the fun from programming and is quite tiring in the end.
Go may be just the thing to avoid many of C's tediousnesses, while keeping most of C's expressive power plus quite some of its own, and give me back the fun I have been missing.
http://golang.org/
Update: In the meantime I have learned that Go does no implicit conversion between strings and integers, but instead uses a common interface for print formatting, which is even better.
Update of the update: Later I learned that there is not (and cannot be) one common interface for print formatting implemented by all types and objects, but the formatter code looks at the value via reflection to decide how it should be formatted. There is built-in knowledge for simple types, an interface that can be used for those struct types that implement it, and generic code to explore other struct types via reflection.