[14113]

From the article: "[...] as developers get more and more senior, they tend to ignore more and more problems, because they've gotten so used to it. That's the way it's always been done, and they've learned to live with them, so they've stopped questioning it any more."

[AnimalMuppet]

As developers get more and more senior, they have a different perspective on what constitutes a "serious" problem. Also, as developers get more experience with a language, they get better at doing things in ways that are idiomatic for that language - they work with the language instead of against it.

Take Haskell. If I were a Haskell novice, and tried to do everything procedurally with do notation, and then complained that Haskell had all these problems, would that make Haskell a bad language? No. Would it mean that all Haskell programmers were telling themselves lies in order to keep using it? No. It would mean that I was using it badly.

If I were a brand new programmer, and took up Java, I might well complain about "public static void main(String[] args)". But an experienced programmer would brush that off, telling me that that's just syntax - there are real problems with Java, but that isn't one.

So this particular statement, that senior and more experienced devs ignore more and more problems, isn't proof of anything. It's particularly not proof that developers have to keep lying to themselves in order to keep using Go. (They may, but this isn't proof.)

[tracerbulletx]

As developers get more and more senior they tend to ignore more and more problems because they realize the majority of them actually don't matter very much to doing useful work.

[mumblemumble]

Or, perhaps more frequently, they can quickly see that any possible fix for it would be penny wise and pound foolish.

[hnlmorg]

He made some good points in the article but this particular paragraph stuck out as being hypocritical. The entire motivation of him writing this was because he felt people dismissed his previous article out of hand. And then he makes a remark that preemptively dismisses any rebuttal out of hand (and as others have pointed out, can equally apply to any language so hardly a point worth complaining against Go specifically).

[randomdata]

> as developers get more and more senior, they tend to ignore more and more problems, because they've gotten so used to it.

I've been coding professionally since the 90s. The last project I worked on was in Go. It was pleasant and surprisingly productive. A few warts, like the parent said, but all told it was a great experience. I'm now working on a Typescript project. It is painful. Typescript itself is quite nice, but the deep problems with the rest of the ecosystem have not gone unnoticed.

[yegle]

Hmm won't this apply to any language and therefore not a valid argument? A: language FOO is a great language! B: You are telling lies because you are fluent in this language and ignore the problems in the language.

[formerly_proven]

IME there are sort of two kinds of people here. People who are "fans" and defend "their" toy and people who don't. For example, I've been using Python for a very long time. I'm a "Senior Python Developer" so to speak. I quite like it for various purposes, but I can also talk your ear off about problems with Python.

I'd say if you run into someone who says they're experienced with X or love X etc., but they can't give criticism of it, they're most likely either not that experienced with X, or fanboys.

[sophacles]

Yes. This is true of any environment. That's why I ask new hires to write down every WTF moment, every question and every idea for improvement they have as they get up to speed on our systems. Just because I'm used to avoiding a problem doesn't mean the problem must exist.

[xtracto]

It seems to me there are two ways to evaluate the "beauty" of a language: there's the people who love the language theoretically (well constructed, coherent, nice typing, etc) and then there's people who love the usefulness/utility of the language.

For example, I hate python as a language (spaces syntax? Self,self,self, lack of static type, etc) but I've been using it lately and it's nice using it due to libraries, community,etc.

[jayd16]

Just speaking abstractly, whether problems are ignored has no bearing on the existence, size or count of the problems.