What Golang Is and Is Not
&gt; “There is nothing new under the sun” rings true in all languages since the 80’s.<p>Really? Nothing? Sure a language like Rust has drawn from many other concepts in other languages, but it has done so while actually bringing high level features to a language that has zero overhead costs. But yes, it&#x27;s not simple like Go.<p>Did Go need to make all errors unchecked? There are no guide rails telling you that you forgot to check an error result. This is a runtime thing you need to discover. Is this actually simpler?<p>Go made the decision to allow for Null, even after nearly every other modern language and other older ones are trying to kick it to the curb; Swift, Rust, Scala, Kotlin, no nulls (the JVM ones have a compatability problem, as does swift with ObjC, but still). Is it simpler to delay discovery of Null data to runtime?<p>Go decided to not have generics, to keep the language easier to learn and more approachable. It&#x27;s hard to argue with this one. Like lambdas, it can be a complicated concept to learn, but once you unlock this in you code, you write less code and accomplish more. So yes, it&#x27;s simpler, but at too high a cost IMO.<p>To me the innovative feature of Go is the small runtime built into the binary making deployment dead simple and easy. This is a million times better than JVM, Ruby, Python, Perl, etc. This is a huge improvement over Java, and something every language should have an option for. Ironically this is also the least innovative feature, because this is how static binaries in C and C++ have worked for years.<p>I think this article is very well written, but I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s fair to the innovation going on in other languages.<p>(Disclaimer: I used Go, discovered the three primary flaws as I listed above, and then searched for a better language. It would be fair to call me a hater, usually I try to avoid this, but in this case that&#x27;s fine with me)