Re:Seven years of Go
by Someone on Thursday November 10, 2016 @03:42PM
(#12924136)
Almost any powerful new feature in any language initially gets overused, but that isn't a reason to ban it.
Class hierarchies, for example, got heavily overused before people discovered that composition most of the time is the better option, exceptions got overused before people learnt to only use them in exceptional cases, and dependency injection and XML (one of the first environments with strong support for it) got overused in Java programs.
Generics are going the same way, if they haven't already (JavaScript modules will get there, too, but that seems at least a generation of programmers away)
Also, the only difference I see between generics (with a bit of 'compile-time reflection') and go generate is that the former may be too magical for some, while the latter requires programmers to do more work (writing special comments to use existing functionality, and writing AST manipulation code to write new ones) and that it generates files only because the compiler wants to see them.
Class hierarchies, for example, got heavily overused before people discovered that composition most of the time is the better option, exceptions got overused before people learnt to only use them in exceptional cases, and dependency injection and XML (one of the first environments with strong support for it) got overused in Java programs.
Generics are going the same way, if they haven't already (JavaScript modules will get there, too, but that seems at least a generation of programmers away)
Also, the only difference I see between generics (with a bit of 'compile-time reflection') and go generate is that the former may be too magical for some, while the latter requires programmers to do more work (writing special comments to use existing functionality, and writing AST manipulation code to write new ones) and that it generates files only because the compiler wants to see them.