Post by @brainblasted@crab.garden

2026-03-07 06:16 UTC

Every time I&#39;m in a programming mood and start feeling the itch to learn more and explore new things, I look at Go and find myself baffled. Not just by the language itself, but how adamantly the community defends poor choices. People will look you dead in the eye and say that there&#39;s no good justification for having enums

Replies (2)

@torb@hachyderm.io 2026-03-07 06:29

@brainblasted@crab.garden In their defense: the whole language is a (over) reaction to languages in the 90s (like C++) having every feature under the sun and becoming incredibly complex and brittle for it. I think the exercise of trying to make a minimalist language that is still useful is a valid one, but I don't like the specific choice Go made. But if you're making a language where you're supposed to write a lot of mutable code and it's simple I can see why you end up with their choices (and some of them are almost uniquely good, like their take on structural typing and interfaces). Anyway, as much as I love simple languages (Gleam is one that is similarly simple as Go, but IMO makes better choices) I fear that this focus on simplicity often forces them to make awkward choices like the one you're frustrated by. (Sorry for wall of text, I just find this very interesting!)

Open ##5072147
@smn@l3ib.org 2026-03-07 15:15

@brainblasted@crab.garden fully agree about how weird Go's popularity is despite the flaws in the language that I feel like you hit as soon as you try to do anything even slightly sophisticated. Now for my hot take: same for python

Open ##5072163