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I disagree, especially in the presence of syntax highlighting editors.
String interpolation would be a redundant alternative to existing mechanisms (the above plus text/template for longer strings) and just make parsing more complex. I don't think it would fit in well with Go's philosophy of providing pleasant, minimalistic syntax.
It works really well in its current form, that is probably the general consensous.
> additional features are a source of evil
Some of us have walked down that path before (e.g. Perl, Scala) and think we have seen the light (or at least the darkness).
> up until the day when they are added, in which case they are suddenly evidence of the language's superiority
That sounded very much like flamebait. Could you name an example of a feature added to Go that was previously considered evil and then as evidence of Go's superiority?
Then a representative from Microsoft started attending a couple of the biggest Java SIGs, and he would ask us how we would change Java if we could. We were happy to answer. A few of the suggestions were broadly desired by the groups.
He took lots of notes, and a year or so later C# was announced. It included several of those features. My impression is that most of us considered it a better Java, as a language design. (The Achilles Heel of its relationship to Microsoft was a huge, but separate, issue from the design of the language itself.)
The Java Team suddenly had a whole new attitude about their fossilized masterpiece, and features we had been told for years were bad ideas were touted as evidence of Java's ongoing spirit of innovation with each new version of Java.
>> additional features are a source of evil
> Some of us have walked down that path before (e.g. Perl, Scala) and think we have seen the light (or at least the darkness).
We've walked down that path and have been very happy and productive with Scala. Each to his own I guess.
Every syntax highlighter in an editor I've seen for Ruby handle highlighting string interpolation just fine.
I definitely don't have a problem with the Go developers keeping out random syntax additions unless they think its a really good idea.
Along the same lines, I really miss not having `map`, `reduce`, and `filter` in Go. However, it doesn't seem like those would be efficient in Go, or that they fit in with as well with systems programming, which Go was designed for. So I can't hate them for not including these.
map, reduce, filter, etc will be easy to code up once there are generics. There will almost certainly be generics in Go at some point, that point is just not right now (and almost certainly not before 2.0).
