Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?
I find myself reaching for it over other languages when I want to build small servers with a bit of in-memory state or a bit of heavy processing. For little search-engines, Go is perfect. While writing servers in Flask + Python is much more convenient, I still prefer Go because I don't run into the limits that Python has.The development process is fluid enough that I wish the language was suited to more usecases. When I need to handle complicated data (e.g. abstract syntax trees), I use Rust or Haskell because of their rich data types. But it tends to be much harder to get things running in those languages (borrow-checker and monads, respectively). I want to reach for Go to make those problems go away, but then realize that it would be really painful to try to express the program in Go. I understand that other people are unhappy with Go's development process, particularly if you deal with package versioning.The language design itself may have been backed into a corner where adding generics will create an ugly mess (what will the standard library look like if it tries to maintain backwards compatibility?). Time will tell.The tooling is mostly pretty good, but many things feel half-baked (compared to more mature ecosystems). On the spectrum of 'written in a weekend' to 'dozens of developer-years of work', the package "net/http/pprof" feels closer to the weekend side. There are bright sides, like having the production parser available as a library.It's a language that is frustrating in different ways from other languages. Instead of fighting with Cabal/Stack, you have to write a million `if err != nil {}` statements. Part of what makes it frustrating is seeing how good it could have been.