Re:Eight years of Go
by TheOtherHobbes on Friday November 10, 2017 @02:55PM
(#15672444)
Go has human-sized simplicity. Programming language complexity is limited by human cognitive limitations, and Go has a small cognitive load.
This makes it feel like a very intuitive language.
That doesn't mean it is an intuitive language - just that it feels like one for a specific class of problems.
Personally I enjoy using it for the same reasons as everyone else. But... I'm also aware it's quite an old-fashioned language, with some bumps under the floorboards where useful things were hammered down to make them go away, instead of being fully solved.
There is a good chance you are right.
But as long as it is humans writing most/all Go code, fitting a human brain well is a valid design choice.
Yes, it has its fair share of problems. But for now, I find it preferable to anything else we have got.
For writing toy programs to relax (can relate), I personally prefer Python, or maybe a Scheme. While also being simple at the core concepts, they have much more expressive power, an easier way to combine simple things into complex things. They pay for that by higher resource consumption, of course. I do fondly remember a PDP-11 Pascal compiler reporting "15 KB used" after compiling my program; you can't get a Python process with these constraints. But by now we have _vastly_ more computing power.