Go is a deserving target for this criticism because the language itself deliberately made a lot of the mistakes other language communities made and learned from, like weak typing[1] and naive garbage collection algorithms. Literally if you opened an undergraduate textbook on either topic you'd see much better ways to do things. But early adopters argued vehemently that Go was simple and didn't need those things.
It does seem like Go is learning from their mistakes here: they've introduced precise garbage collection and it seems like some form of generic or template types are inbound in the next few releases. Perhaps in a few years Go will be a language I am willing to work in. But it would have been nice if a new language which already had these problems worked out had become popular, instead Go, which has reached popularity through hype rather than technical merit[2].
Tracking the history of template/generic types has been somewhat humorous: you can almost see it in this article[3] where the author starts in with the title "Who needs generics!", goes on to describe some frankly horrible ways to get around the lack of generics (it's amazing how complex Go's simplicity can be!) and finally backpedals in an update ("I am the last one to balk at the idea of generics in Go."). I don't mean this to be picking on the author here though--I've seen this history played out on other blogs and in the comments of Hacker News as well.
[1] Before you flame me on this, ask yourself if you can articulate the difference between strong and static types, because if you can't, you don't have the prerequisite knowledge to have an opinion on this.
[2] It's worth noting that the decisions made in Go probably have merit within the context of Google. The problem is that most Go users aren't at Google, and have different problems than Google, so the tradeoffs made by Go are nonsensical for their use cases.
None of this makes NIH a less than widespread phenomenon.
The readers of this forum often do know their type theory. Gatekeeping otherwise won’t go over well, it just reads like an arrogant insult from someone utterly lacking in self-awareness and accustomed to presuming themselves the smartest person in the room with the only relevant opinion. Ironically, given the subtopic, much like Google often does.
The fact that you ask a question not expecting a direct answer is not proof that a direct answer does not exist.
> People don’t inwardly digest the mistakes of others.
In my spare time, I'm a rock climber, and mistakes in my rope systems can kill me. The same is true in mycology, firearms, airplane piloting, civil engineering. If you really feel that you can only learn from your own mistakes then I guess it's lucky for you that you've chosen to learn in a field where the stakes aren't life and death.
> The readers of this forum often do know their type theory.
That's true. The same is not true for the many Gophers who repeatedly claim that Go has a strong type system, which is who that comment was directed at.
I’d be happy to repeat my assertion though. People don’t inwardly digest the mistakes of others, which is why educators on safety-critical topics such as those mentioned must go to extraordinary lengths to extract and convey the salient teachings, translated into better practices, drills, equipment etc.
Reading the archives of the Dropzone fatalities database, for example, won’t make me a better skydiver.
Conversely, the best structured educational processes I’ve experienced are essentially offering the student the opportunity to make their own mistakes, but under circumstances that don’t have consequences (other than pedagogical or scholastic)
That's a pretty self-aggrandizing analysis of the situation.
From my perspective, I got you to make the statement, "People don’t inwardly digest the mistakes of others", which sounds a lot more absurd when you actually say what you mean plainly instead of hiding it in rhetoric.
Maybe some people go through life that way, but that's a pretty poor life strategy and I personally make a pretty big effort to learn from other peoples' mistakes. Maybe I haven't been successful always, but I can point to lots of examples of where I have.
That's quite the signal of bad faith debate. I don't think it's my own aggrandizement in play here. Quite the reverse. c.f. remarks passim re. hubris. So there the conversation must end.
All I did was get you to say clearly what you believe. If what you believe is so embarrassing that it's a sign of bad faith to get you to say it in clearly, maybe believe better things?
Another way to discover any mistakes is to ask people why they didn't do certain things which you think are good ideas. Often that reveals that they did do that, and it turned out poorly.
I bet anyone at Google is able to access ACM, SIGPLAN, HOPL, IEEE, USENIX papers.
Counterpoint: how is anyone supposed to learn, if not from their mistakes? We might worry about the blast radius, but there’s no compression algorithm for experience.