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Top-level
@mhoye agreed generally, but Go has good error messages, so it can't be as simple as "personality cult that formed around the PDP-11 in the 1970s convince us that it was pure and good that docs and error messages are garbage", can it? I remember seeing Russ Cox get raked over the coals once in a discussion when someone asked/complained about (a) knowing that something that worked in C wouldn't work in Go but (b) not knowing how to actually do that thing in Go. 1/2 4 comments
 @colby So, Plan9 is a personality cult that formed as a reaction to the personality cult that formed around the PDP-11 in the 1970s, in the 1980s. I'm being a little bit sarcastic here, but if you scrape off the paint you start to notice that Go is in many respects "Plan 9 but we have a budget and nobody can stop us". (I don't actually think "you can do X in C, therefore it's bad that can't you do it in [lang]" is all that interesting or insightful. It certainly hasn't stood up to the scrutiny of modern language design. One core tenet of basically every language designed from Java onward is that "you can do any arbitrary thing" is dangerous and bad, and that restrictions and guardrails in software are Quite Good And Important Actually. |
Gregory's Server
Russ's prescription was to just trying doing it. The idea being that the Go compiler's error messages were so good that it recognized that you were trying to do something from C but didn't work the same way in Go, and it told you how to do the right thing instead, almost like a more knowledgeable programming partner. Very thoughtful, very empathetic.
He got eviscerated for this.
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