I want off Mr. Golang’s Wild Ride (2020)
I see Go as a language for some use cases on some Unix platforms. It was clearly designed early in the current iteration of &quot;modern&quot; programming languages and I firmly believe that Rust, for example, learned a lot from the mistakes Go made.<p>My impression is that Go as a language tries to make things simple, but things aren&#x27;t always simple. Time and date operations are hard and simplification leads to I correctness.<p>If you just want to show a nicely formatted number, you don&#x27;t want to care about wall time, you want to show a number that&#x27;s good enough. Go gives you something that&#x27;s probably good enough. It&#x27;s not correct, but who cares? For the purposes of the people who made Go you don&#x27;t need correctness.<p>Same with the permissions. Permissions are hard, especially on flexible systems like Windows. Unix pretends these problems don&#x27;t exist and Go as a languages tries to pretend Windows is just a weird flavour of Unix. For most use cases, this is fine; read only is normally the only flag you care about as a developer and read only is something the API will give you. If you want something correct, go get a library or something.<p>Then the path issue. Paths are hard. Path separator APIs are hard, especially if your standard library doesn&#x27;t like using the operating system&#x27;s standard methods for dealing with paths. Most paths are UTF8-compatible strings. Sure, Windows is UTF-16 and plenty of real-world file systems don&#x27;t even have UTF support at all, but most file systems used by most users are compatible enough. If your file system shows you weird bytes, that&#x27;s either a mistake or you&#x27;re using some kind of complex, incompatible encoding (some Asian languages have these still in use). Go is simple, you&#x27;re either the common use case or you&#x27;re wrong.<p>This all makes Go quite simple to work with for many use cases. It simplifies your computer and makes some of the decisions for you. That&#x27;s not even a bad thing if you&#x27;re using it as a replacement for hacky shell scripts and messy Python tools, because people usually ignore the real life complexities of computers in there too.<p>For a system that&#x27;s supposed to be correct, I wouldn&#x27;t even think about using Go, because it chooses simplicity over correctness. For something that I kind of, sort of, probably want to just work most of the time, the language works fine. Sure, the code looks like drunk Python combined wirh endless checks to see if err is nil, but it works. It&#x27;s very easy to get productive with Go if you can get over the language itself. Just go in with the right assumptions.<p>Similarly, don&#x27;t go into C or Rust if you want a simple programming language. Rust is trying to be correct, or even pedantic, more than it&#x27;s trying to be simple. Writing correct code is verbose and annoying and dense languages like Rust will easily allow you to write an unreadable mess. C, on the other hand, will let you do your own thing: whenever there&#x27;s any kind of complexity, the language shrugs and says &quot;you probably should check this but if you don&#x27;t, well, let&#x27;s just call it undefined behaviour and move on&quot;. It could be correct, or it could not be and you&#x27;ll probably never know for sure.<p>There are tons of simple programming languages, even ones that do the correctness deal better than Go. Take a look at C# and Java (or if you want to feel like you&#x27;re writing modern code, maybe Kotlin), with platforms made to work on Windows and Linux with their crazy quirks. Go isn&#x27;t a universal solution because no universal solution exists.