alt Hacker NewsUnder the hood, in both Java and C# the first argument of an instance method is the instance reference itself. After all, instance methods imply you have an instance to work with. Having to write 'this' by hand for such is how OOP was done before OOP languages became a thing.
I agree that adopting yet another pattern like this would be on brand for Go since it prizes taking its opinionated way of going about everything in a vintage kind of way over being practical and convenient.
As a newcomer to Go, a lot of their design decisions made a lot of sense when I realized that a lot of the design is based around this idea of "make it impossible to do something that could be dumb in some contexts".
For example, I hate that there's no inheritance. I wish I could create a ContainerImage object and then a RemoteContainerImage subclass and then QuayContainerImage and DockerhubContainerImage subclasses from those. However, being able to do inheritance, and especially multiple inheritance, can lead to awful, idiotic code that is needlessly complicated for no good reason.
At a previous job we had a script that would do operations on a local filesystem and then FTP items to a remote. I thought okay, the fundamental paradigms of FTP and SFTP-over-SSH via the paramiko module are basically identical so it should be a five minute job to patch it in, right?
Turns out this Python script, which, fundamentally, consisted of "take these files here and put them over there" was the most overdesigned piece of garbage I've ever seen. Clean, effective, and entirely functional code, but almost impossible to reason about. The code that did the actual work was six classes and multiple subclasses deep, but assumptions were baked in at every level. FTP-specific functionality which called a bunch of generic functionality which then called a bunch of FTP-specific functionality. In order to add SFTP support I would have had to effectively rewrite 80% of the code because even the generic stuff inherited from the FTP-specific stuff.
Eventually I gave up entirely and just left it alone; it was too important a part of a critical workflow to risk breaking and I never had the time or energy to put my frustration aside. Golang, for all its flaws, would have prevented a lot of that because a lot of the self-gratification this programmer spent his time on just wouldn't have been possible in Go for exactly this reason.