That's saying the same thing. If you give someone the ability to understand a brilliant language, they will turn their attention to the language and away from the problem. That's just human nature. Shiny attracts us. Let's be honest, we all have way more fun diving deep into crafting the perfect type in Haskell. But Pike indicates that if you constrain developers to bounds that they already know, where they can't turn their attention to learning about what is brilliant, then they won't be compelled away from what actually matters – the engineering.
> then they won't be compelled away from what actually matters – the engineering.
Maybe it is, to the extend that playing with lego blocks authorised by the lego corporation is considered engineering. That, of course, is a silly line to draw for defining the discipline.
> we all have way more fun diving deep into crafting the perfect type in Haskell
What Haskell allows you to do in practice is defining required and missing control flows (for solving your problems) as types[0], and constraining those types with rules that define your business domains the control flows must operate in. That is the actual engineering, as opposed to joining plastic bricks.
> What Haskell allows you to do in practice is defining required and missing control flows
It allows that in theory, at least, certainly. That's the whole reason for its existence. But in practice, developers become enamoured with the language and start to forget about the problem. If that weren't a problem we'd all be using Haskell, but back in the real world.
The reason we’re not all using Haskell is because like any language it has pros and cons and isn’t the best choice for every niche. Not because “developers become enamored with the language and start to forget about the problem”.
Anyway, why do Go fans always reach for the Haskell strawman in discussions like this? Most mainstream languages are not nearly as exotic as Haskell, while also not being intentionally crippled like Go. But for some reason Go fans always want to compare it to Haskell.
Even JavaScript, Python and Java are not allergic to adding modern features like iterator map/filter/etc., do you think those are esoteric ivory tower languages too?
> The reason we’re not all using Haskell is because like any language it has pros and cons and isn’t the best choice for every niche.
Exactly. Thanks for reiterating.
> Anyway, why do Go fans always reach for the Haskell strawman in discussions like this?
What's a Go fan? Someone who thinks that Go blows? That is as bizarre as becoming enamoured by a language. What leads one to have feelings about a language anyway? It is an impossible to understand concept for me.
> Even JavaScript, Python and Java are not allergic to adding modern features like iterator map/filter/etc.
In what world are patterns from the 1960s "modern"? Do you consider selt belts in cars to also be a modern feature?
> What leads one to have feelings about a language anyway?
Not a single person reading this thread believes that you are a coolly detached rational observer
Responding to an argument by not only pretending not to have an opinion, but pretending not to understand the concept of having an opinion, is a very interesting rhetorical strategy. Not sure it works
> Not a single person reading this thread believes that you are a coolly detached rational observer
All one of them?
> Responding to an argument by not only pretending not to have an opinion
The "argument" has only ever been about sharing of that which we understand as fact. One can present a case for why an apparent fact is not factual – mistakes and misinformation can, indeed, slip in – but what is fact would not rest on one's feelings towards it. The story of Go is the same whether you love it, hate it, ascribe no emotion towards it, or even if you have never heard of it before.
> but pretending not to understand the concept of having an opinion
Feeling and opinion traditionally do not imply the exact same thing – they are different words for a reason – so it is not clear if you misspoke, don't recognize a difference, or if you are trying to change the subject, but I will, for the sake of quality, assume the former. While I can understand feelings in some contexts, like feelings towards people, I have no idea why an inanimate programming language would conjure feelings? That is like developing feelings towards a grain of sand you found on the beach, which I don't understand either.
I am not about to claim nobody develops feelings for inanimate programming languages. Humans are varieitied and can do all sorts of weird and wonderful things, but that does not imply I understand it. Feel free to explain it, though. That's the beauty of not understanding something: You get to learn!
I mean, that's why I also asked last time. Surely you're not one of those anti-education types?
> Not sure it works
Okay, cool. Is this some kind of problem, or why are you mentioning it?
Is there any evidence that the Go style of constraints increases productivity or code quality or other metrics compared to "shiny" languages? I've heard that point repeated many times, but people have done a decent amount of engineering in many other languages too, without the need to be limited like that.
I expect nobody outside of Google has ever truly taken the time to study it. When was the last time you saw a programmer actually research the effectiveness of their tools and not just land on "I like this. It feels right." I never have!
But I'm not sure it matters. Go was created to test the theory, not because a theory was proven. It didn't have to be successful. It may be that the studies didn't happen even within Google, although that is our greatest chance. We do know Google actually cares about data, unlike programmers.
That said, since Go was released it seems every other language has tried to copy it with their own twist, so while that may not come from a place of evidence, it would appear that the feeling of increased productivity[1] was felt.
[1] Or something adjacent. Focusing on engineering isn't necessarily about productivity. You can't discount productivity, but it is not the top engineering concern, especially in a place like Google.
> since Go was released it seems every other language has tried to copy it
What are you referring to here? I would consider myself quite well-apprised of recent developments in PL theory (and practice) and I am struggling to come up with examples matching this description.
Go's main selling point, at least as of 10 years ago, was its green threading system, and even at the time it was substantially inferior to the green threading systems available in BEAM (Erlang, Elixir) or GHC Haskell
> Java's latest addition of green threads is 100% lifted from Go.
Why do you say it was lifted from Go and not from one of the places Go lifted it from, like the two I mentioned?
> Rust and Zig's built-in language tooling
Maybe my memory is failing here, but I don't recall rust ecosystem tooling ever lagging behind Go's. The opposite, if anything.
> Java's ZGC/value types
Can't comment on this one, could be right, although are any of these things clearly sourced from Go? Not disagreeing, I just don't know the history here.
I'm willing to believe that Java is copying from Go, because it's one of the most lumbering languages in popular use today.
> Broad industry trend towards providing easy cross compilation into static binaries.
I'm pretty sure Go does't get credit for this one either. This has been happening independently across many ecosystems as a natural response to increasing containerization and falling storage costs.
Deno 2.0 explicitly copied Go in many features, especially with dependencies being referenced via URL, and many of the CLI's commands are inspired by Go such as install, fmt, and test.
> If you give someone the ability to understand a brilliant language, they will turn their attention to the language and away from the problem. That's just human nature.
Not sure which languages you define as brilliant but I’ve never seen this pattern anywhere in my career, in any language. Including Rust, which is often offered by Go fans as an example of an esoteric exotic language.
In everywhere I’ve seen, people are focused on solving some engineering problem, not on showing off their brilliance by solving language puzzles.
This defense of Go is REALLY common but as far as I can tell is purely based on myth.
> I’ve never seen this pattern anywhere in my career
Me neither, but I've never actually tired to look. In honesty, have you? It is not exactly to the faint of heart to study. I suspect only Google is willing to go to the necessary depts. But, if you know of something otherwise, I'm sure we're all interested in the details.
> This defense of Go is REALLY common but as far as I can tell is purely based on myth.
1. Defence? Are you in some kind of fight...? That doesn't make any sense.
2. Myth? Are you confusing the hypothesis on which Go was built with results of experimentation? It very well may be that the hypothesis didn't stand up to experimentation, but what does that have to with our discussion? Furthermore, if you really want to change the subject to talk about that, why have you failed to tell us anything about the details of experimentation?
I recognized exactly that way back in 1995. I used to teach Clipper in the late 80s and early 90s and you could do so much with it. It's competitor was FoxPro, which was far less capable.
However, in hindsight after I quit using it I realized that Clipper developers often focused on perfecting code — myself included — whereas FoxPro developers just got shit done for the client/end-user. #fwiw
