I was thinking of Go when I re-read that article. Unlike many here on HN, I am not a fan of Go because I find it far too opinionated and untrusting of its users. While technically it might have been written for Pike's and Thompson's friends, it does feel to me like a language designed to prevent poor programmers from making mistakes.
> it does feel to me like a language designed to prevent poor programmers from making mistakes.
That's Rust. I would not call _any_ language containing some kind of nil pointers to be " designed to prevent poor programmers from making mistakes". Go is mainly designed to be "easy to read" (and excels at that if you are used to C-style syntax).
I find python quite hard to read, honestly. The lack of typing in most python means that it isn’t immediately clear what a given piece of code does without diving into its implementation. You have to rely on docstrings (good luck) or descriptive naming.
The issue with null pointers is that they are, as you said, a stand-in for an invalid state. However, most null pointers don’t prevent you from trying to use the underlying data, which can, among other things, cause crashes (think not checking the return value of malloc). Additionally, it doesn’t make formal the litany of possible forms that a value can take — if you codify possible states, then you don’t always need to check everything. I’m currently working to port security firmware from C to Rust, and I’ve found I make fewer state checks, because the data I’m working with has bounded state — the data given cannot be in an invalid state.
Types really only help when they're primitives. You're going to have a million random classes that are only used in a few places. Seeing `ConfigManagerFactory config_manager_factory` doesn't help. What helps is avoiding excessive oop and making sure objects are printable for debug, imo something Javascript does a lot better.
Re null pointers, in Java or Python they raise an exception. Isn't that ok? It doesn't end up doing something invalid like in C.
Agreed. However, IMO Go's designers have good taste. That's hard to quantify but you know it when you see it and I see it in Go. Not so much in most other languages. Again, IMO.
Arguably, Go is the only language I couldn’t even infer the syntax for before learning it.
I can quite easily follow any ML, or C-like language, even if this is the first time I see it, and then go just writes some bullshit list of tokens, where you can’t even decipher which is a type or an identifier name. And then does some receiver syntax in function definitions that is absolutely unhinged.
I really dislike Golang, everything about it, even the name, and this is one reason. C C++ Rust can do systems stuff, Java JS Python and even C# can do applications. All with pretty intuitive syntax except for Rust kinda, but Rust has good reasons for that.
I don't get why Golang, ObjC, or Swift exist other than some company pushing them, and their guiding design principles are "be different to be different."
