>I also think it's fundamentally broken by a couple of stupid decisions the designers made: no exceptions, no parametric polymorphism.
Is C "fundamentally broken" too? It doesn't have exceptions or parametric polymorphism either, but people seem to get a lot of work done. Fuck, people even get work done with Javascript, that's it's a bona fide example of a language with broken semantics (Harmony fixes some of those).
The thing is, "fundamentally broken" to me sounds like "it's totally unusable", and that is far from the truth. You might call it "not as convenient as it could be", but not "fundamentally broken". Broken implies "it doesn't work". Well, Go works fine.
Parametric polymorphism would be nice -- at least they are already thinking of adding generics in some v2.0 edition. But it's not a showstopper either, as in "fundamentally broken".
>I also think it's fundamentally pointed at the wrong problem domain: systems languages don't have runtime libraries, don't have garbage collection and don't require operating systems beneath them so that they can write free-standing systems code.
Well, by the "systems" moniker, they don't mean OSs and drivers, they mean what other people call large scale application systems. What you'd might use Erlang for, for example. Server stuff with high concurrency and big memory/cpu etc needs, but without all the C pain. From stuff like, say, Solr, to Hadoop, to Cassandra, etc, ...
>I can't say as much for every fad-of-the-decade-in-industry thing like Java or Go.
I wouldn't call Go "fad of the decade". For one it's not a fad, as it's not even popular.
>*And as to "fads-of-the-day-in-academia", Scala is the single best language I've ever used. And I don't even use all of it. I just use the subset of Scala that is Everything Java Should Have Been.
Well, I like Scala too. But it lacks some things that Go has, and help me in a few cases: no static binaries. No control over memory alignment. No dead easy FFI to C. No dead simple syntax I can understand in a weekend.
C was designed and released in, IIRC, 1972. If someone designed and released C in the year 2012 as a new, state-of-the-art systems programming language, I would tear their guts out for releasing something so fundamentally broken, unsafe, obsolete and simplistic!
>people seem to get a lot of work done.
Quite to the contrary, the entire shift to virtual machines and scripting languages happened because people didn't like using C and C++ for application domains where their advantages don't count.
Is C "fundamentally broken" too? It doesn't have exceptions or parametric polymorphism either, but people seem to get a lot of work done. Fuck, people even get work done with Javascript, that's it's a bona fide example of a language with broken semantics (Harmony fixes some of those).
The thing is, "fundamentally broken" to me sounds like "it's totally unusable", and that is far from the truth. You might call it "not as convenient as it could be", but not "fundamentally broken". Broken implies "it doesn't work". Well, Go works fine.
Parametric polymorphism would be nice -- at least they are already thinking of adding generics in some v2.0 edition. But it's not a showstopper either, as in "fundamentally broken".
>I also think it's fundamentally pointed at the wrong problem domain: systems languages don't have runtime libraries, don't have garbage collection and don't require operating systems beneath them so that they can write free-standing systems code.
Well, by the "systems" moniker, they don't mean OSs and drivers, they mean what other people call large scale application systems. What you'd might use Erlang for, for example. Server stuff with high concurrency and big memory/cpu etc needs, but without all the C pain. From stuff like, say, Solr, to Hadoop, to Cassandra, etc, ...
>I can't say as much for every fad-of-the-decade-in-industry thing like Java or Go.
I wouldn't call Go "fad of the decade". For one it's not a fad, as it's not even popular.
>*And as to "fads-of-the-day-in-academia", Scala is the single best language I've ever used. And I don't even use all of it. I just use the subset of Scala that is Everything Java Should Have Been.
Well, I like Scala too. But it lacks some things that Go has, and help me in a few cases: no static binaries. No control over memory alignment. No dead easy FFI to C. No dead simple syntax I can understand in a weekend.
So, see, everything is a compromise.