Problems with Go channels (2016)

Go's design consistently at every turn chose the simplest (one might say "dumbest", but I don't mean it entirely derogatory) way to do something. It was the simplest most obvious choice made by a very competent engineer. But it was entirely made in isolation, not by a language design expert.

Go designs did not actually go out and research language design. It just went with the gut feel of the designers.

But that's just it, those rules are there for a reason. It's like the rules of airplane design: Every single rule was written in blood. You toss those rules out (or don't even research them) at your own, and your user's, peril.

Go's design reminds me of Brexit, and the famous "The people of this country have had enough of experts". And like with Brexit, it's easy to give a lame catch phrase, which seems convincing and makes people go "well what's the problem with that, keeping it simple?".

Explaining just what the problem is with this "design by catchphrase" is illustrated by the article. It needs ~100 paragraphs (a quick error prone scan was 86 plus sample code) to explain just why these choices leads to a darkened room with rakes sprinkled all over it.

And this article is just about Go channels!

Go could get a 100 articles like this written about it, covering various aspects of its design. They all have the same root cause: Go's designers had enough of experts, and it takes longer to explain why something leads to bad outcomes, than to just show the catchphrase level "look at the happy path. Look at it!".

I dislike Java more than I dislike Go. But at least Java was designed, and doesn't have this particular meta-problem. When Go was made we knew better than to design languages this way.

But they were working in a bit of a vacuum. Not only were they mostly addressing the internal needs of Google, which is a write-only shop as far as the rest of the software industry is concerned, they also didn't have broad experience across many languages, and instead had deep experience with a few languages.

In it, he seems to believe that the primary use of types in programming languages is to build hierarchies. He seems totally unfamiliar with ideas behind ML or haskell.

Go was the third language he played a major part in creating (predecessors are Newsqueak and Limbo), and his pedigree before Google includes extensive experience on Unix at Bell Labs. He didn't create C but he worked directly with the people who did and he likely knows it in and out. So I stand by my "deep, not broad" observation.

Ken Thompson requires no introduction, though I don't think he was involved much beyond Go's internal development. Robert Griesemer is a little more obscure, but Go wasn't his first language either.

> Did the C++ committee really believe that was wrong with C++ was that it didn't have enough features?

C++ was basically saved by C++11. When written in 2012 it may have been seen as a reasonable though contrarian reaction, but history does not agree. It's just wrong.

I'm very much NOT saying that every decision Go made was wrong. And often experts don't predict the future very well. But I do think that this gives further proof that while not a bad coder by any means, no Pike is very much not an expert in PL. Implementing ideas you had from the 1980s adding things you've learned since is not the same thing as learning lessons from the industry in that subfield.