A funny and perceptive take on the Go programming language and the Go team.
In other words, Go represents a kind of Machiavellian power play, orchestrated by slow-and-careful programmers who are tired of suffering for the sins of fast-and-loose programmers. The Go documentation refers quite often to intolerable 45-minute build times suffered by the original designers, and I can’t help but imagine them sitting around and seething about all those unused imports from those “other” programmers, that is, the “bad” programmers. Their solution was not to engage and educate those programmers to change their habits, but rather design a new language that the bad programmers would be compelled to use — and tie down the language sufficiently so that “bad” practices, such as a program containing unused variables, were impossible.
Reading Go’s mailing list and documentation, I get a similar sense of refusal-to-engage — the authors are communicative, to be sure, but in a didactic way. They seem tired of hearing people’s ideas, as if they’ve already thought of everything, and the relative success of Go at Google and elsewhere has only led them to turn the volume knob down. Which is a shame, because they’ll probably miss out on some good ideas (including my highly compelling, backwards-incompatible, double-triple-colon-assignment proposal mentioned above).
I get the same feeling when reading the mailing list.