alt Hacker NewsI've not seen this in my experience tbh, the extra code that Go requires is ugly but not complex, the lack of ergonomics actively discourages "clever" solutions and, as a result of this, people tend to write the kind of straightforward code that doesn't end up needing lengthy programming or intense debugging.
At my workplace we've used many languages over the years (C#, Python, Go) and Go teams are the ones that by far do the least amount of yak shaving and have the most intelligible codebases.
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It's hard and annoying to read though. Constantly beating around the bush, circling the point but not stating it, not unlike LLM prose.
100% also our experience. We have an internal CLI which has grown to almost half a million lines of Go, mostly contributed to by first-time gophers (and agents nowadays), and with relatively little work spent on making sure the core entities and interfaces encourage doing the right thing, the entire codebase is still surprisingly readable and free of unexpected behaviors.
Yep. But with go 1.22/1.23 and later this is changing. It's becoming a hell of a mess like many other big languages. I think it was two consecutive releases back in 2024 where they added for ... range and generics? That was when I gave up.
Sad that the one language that managed to occupy that nice spot in language design space for an extended period of time, isn't doing so anymore.
Of course, you can actively restrict yourself to standard go, but not needing to do that was the whole point.
I’ve always felt like the lack of many complex language features nudges teams to also keep their code simple.
There is always two aspects to a language works in practice: how it formally works, and how the community uses it.
Go is (was?) simple, and also (encouraged by the language and influence from its developers) the community mostly aims to keep the usage simple.