I want off Mr. Golang’s Wild Ride (2020)

My Anecdotal Experience: Golang is great for spinning up new services and tools with very little overhead, the language is well designed for the backend - and the lack of <insert programming language feature here> avoids "odd" decisions which other engineers will dislike in the future. If your job is building lots of new things using relatively common building blocks, then Golang looks fantastic! However on mature services, engineers often need <insert programming language here> because they are dealing with…

The most insightful way I've ever heard Go described is as a "C fanfic". It's like a bunch of C programmers, writing software for web infrastructure, got together and made a wish-list of things they wanted to be different about C (specifically in the context of writing web infrastructure). And then they made a new language, taking the most direct path toward that wish-list, and inheriting most of C's other traits as a matter of course. Taken in this light…

The April 2022 update at the end of the article has a good short summary: > If you're looking to reduce the whole discourse to "X vs Y", let it be "serde vs crossing your fingers and hoping user input is well-formed". It is one of the better reductions of the problem: it really is "specifying behavior that should be allowed (and rejecting everything else)" vs "manually checking that everything is fine in a thousand tiny steps", which inevitably results…

Fine article, but flagging as dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22443363 717 points by whatever_dude 4 months ago 498 comments