Go is still not good

I've been using Go more or less in every full-time job I've had since pre-1.0. It's simple for people on the team to pick up the basics, it generally chugs along (I'm rarely worried about updating to latest version of Go), it has most useful things built in, it compiles fast. Concurrency is tricky but if you spend some time with it, it's nice to express data flow in Go. The type system is most of the time very convenient, if sometimes a bit verbose. Just all-around a trusty tool in the belt.

But I can't help but agree with a lot of points in this article. Go was designed by some old-school folks that maybe stuck a bit too hard to their principles, losing sight of the practical conveniences. That said, it's a _feeling_ I have, and maybe Go would be much worse if it had solved all these quirks. To be fair, I see more leniency in fixing quirks in the last few years, like at some point I didn't think we'd ever see generics, or custom iterators, etc.

The points about RAM and portability seem mostly like personal grievances though. If it was better, that would be nice, of course. But the GC in Go is very unlikely to cause issues in most programs even at very large scale, and it's not that hard to debug. And Go runs on most platforms anyone could ever wish to ship their software on.

But yeah the whole error / nil situation still bothers me. I find myself wishing for Result[Ok, Err] and Optional[T] quite often.

Go was designed by some old-school folks that maybe stuck a bit too hard to their principles, losing sight of the practical conveniences.

I'd say that it's entirely the other way around: they stuck to the practical convenience of solving the problem that they had in front of them, quickly, instead of analyzing the problem from the first principles, and solving the problem correctly (or using a solution that was Not Invented Here).

Go's filesystem API is the perfect example. You need to open files? Great, we'll create

  func Open(name string) (*File, error)

function, you can open files now, done. What if the file name is not valid UTF-8, though? Who cares, hasn't happen to me in the first 5 years I used Go.

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I can count on fewer hands the number of times I've been bitten by such things in over 10 years of professional Go vs bitten just in the last three weeks by half-assed Java.

There is a lot to say about Java, but the libraries (both standard lib and popular third-party ones) are goddamn battle-hardened, so I have a hard time believing your claim.

They might very well be, because time-handling in Java almost always sucked. In the beginning there was java.util.Date and it was very poorly designed. Sun tried to fix that with java.util.Calendar. That worked for a while but it was still cumbersome, Calendar.getInstance() anyone? After that someone sat down and wrote Joda-Time, which was really really cool and IMO the basis of JSR-310 and the new java.time API. So you're kind of right, but it only took them 15 years to make it right.