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0 pointsoblio4y ago0 comments

> plenty argue that it isn't worth the cost in incurs

The other "plenty" were arguing that it was worth the cost.

So color me surprised that this side was right.

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3 comments · 1 top-level

There is no such thing as being right in such matters. Simplicity vs. expressivity is always a subjective trade-off. Otherwise, Zig could not possibly be a good language or Rust would obviously be a complete failure, for example, both of which seem like narrow-minded things to say. Sometimes more simplicity, sometimes more expressivity is better. It depends on for whom and for which tasks.

oblioOP4y ago

Golang competes in exactly the same space as Java and C#. With a small twist, but the same space.

That put a huge burden of proof on the Golang designers as the design space had been studied extensively for 3+ decades. And they skirted around that burden of proof for a while, I never liked their reasoning.

They could have just come out and said the didn't like generics and don't need them for their use cases.

Zig and Rust are in whole 'nother ballgame so there's no point involving them here.

134154y ago

That's a bit of an old-school language flame war response. It seems obvious that there is no objective criterion for determining when a language is simple enough and when it isn't. Not everybody uses Go for the same hypothetical "design space", and the implicit claim in your post that the same criteria do not apply to Rust or Zig is also dubious, as if they couldn't possibly work as languages in the same "design space." We're talking about general purpose languages. To give you an example, Rust is overengineered and way too complex for my needs, it would seriously hamper productivity. It's important to be aware that other programmers' mileages differs.

The bottomline is that it's never fruitful to argue that feature sets that go into "simplicity" do not heavily depend on subjective programmer preferences, their tasks, and the intended application domains. Programming languages are mere tools, nothing else. Choose the one appropriate for your goals.

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