> In fact, Go was designed to enable average programmers to be productive on large systems.
The fallacy in that argument is that effective programming "in the large" requires more features, not less. Sure, there are highly dynamic programming languages that cannot meaningfully support programming beyond the scale of a "personal side project". Ironically for Paul Graham's "Blub" argument, LISP is quite clearly one such language. The same applies to languages such as Python, Ruby or ECMAscript, which would have been among the main alternatives to Go when it was first released.
And one can also fairly argue that Go has in fact made it simpler and easier to "program in the large" compared to C++, Java or C#, which were the other major alternatives to Go around that same time. So Pike's argument is not wrong as far as it goes. It is merely of limited applicability, because the jury is very much still out wrt. more recent and arguably higher-level languages like ReasonML, Kotlin, Dart, Erlang and yes, Rust. It's silly to conflate these languages with the likes of Python or C++, that is indeed the kind of argument that "Blub" was written for!
The fallacy in that argument is that effective programming "in the large" requires more features, not less. Sure, there are highly dynamic programming languages that cannot meaningfully support programming beyond the scale of a "personal side project". Ironically for Paul Graham's "Blub" argument, LISP is quite clearly one such language. The same applies to languages such as Python, Ruby or ECMAscript, which would have been among the main alternatives to Go when it was first released.
And one can also fairly argue that Go has in fact made it simpler and easier to "program in the large" compared to C++, Java or C#, which were the other major alternatives to Go around that same time. So Pike's argument is not wrong as far as it goes. It is merely of limited applicability, because the jury is very much still out wrt. more recent and arguably higher-level languages like ReasonML, Kotlin, Dart, Erlang and yes, Rust. It's silly to conflate these languages with the likes of Python or C++, that is indeed the kind of argument that "Blub" was written for!