[valzam]

Great list of why one can love and hate Go. I really did enjoy writing it but you never get the sense that you can be truly certain your code is robust because of subtle behaviour around nil.

[jbreckmckye]

As a Go learner, the best explanation that has made sense to me is that interface types essentially just compose two pointers:

P1: The type and its method vtable

P2: The value

Once I understood that I could intuit how a nil Foo was not a nil Bar and not an untyped nil either

[whateveracct]

ah yes of course - key semantics of `nil` should totally depend on deep implementation details in my language's runtime.

willem-dafoe-head-tap.gif

[valzam]

I guess as a corollary, Go really rewards writing the dumbest code possible. No advanced type shenanigans, no overuse of interfaces, no complex composition of types. Then you will end up with a very fast, resource light system that just runs forever.

[theshrike79]

And code with zero ability to do fancy trickery ("expressive" as some people like to say) is easy to read even if the codebase - or even the language - is unfamiliar.

Which is really handy when shit's on fire and you need to find the error yesterday. You can just follow what happens instead of trying to figure out the cool tricks the original programmer put in with their super-expressive language.

Yes, the bug is on line 42, but it does two dozen things on the single line...

[eweise]

You could say the same thing about any language. Writing "dumb" code is easier to understand especially in the small. But Go with function that take functions and return functions, channels and generics, can quickly look as complex as other languages.

[h4ck_th3_pl4n3t]

Oh boi, all my RW mutexes for maps across goroutines would disagree.

[usrnm]

To be fair, checking if an interface is nil is very dumb code, and the fact that it doesn't work is one of my biggest gripes with the language. In this case it's clearly the language (creators) who's dumb

[gethly]

> Go really rewards writing the dumbest code possible

Simplicity is hard. You may see it as dumb, other see it as priceless attribute of the language.