I had to switch to go at work recently. I'm having a difficult time with it. I keep listening for what it might teach me, but it has nothing to say, and <i>since</i> it has nothing to say, I can't anticipate its direction. All of its design decisions seem arbitrary because I can't figure out what its goals are.<p>Maybe I'll wake up tomorrow and the light will shine down on me and I'll understand. But from where I'm sitting right now, the lesson go has for us is:<p>> Look around, the hell you see... that's about as good as it gets. There's no point in trying to find a better way, so here's the best way to not bother trying.<p>The author seems to think that the aspirations of more interesting languages are vanities of some sort. Like they're saying "look at me I'm <buzzword>!". But if you study the way people from different language communities behave... it would seem that whatever the buzzword is, it's actually having a significant affect on how they think and how much they enjoy coding. I don't know why you'd withdraw from that.
> A move only the reigning search engine king would dare.<p>It was a reskin of Limbo, which they had released at Bell Labs without a lot of traction.<p>> Most new languages never overcome basic performance issues.<p>Poor performance is a problem with an implementation. Poor expressiveness is a problem with the grammar and semantics of every implementation, especially when you don't let end users extend the language to their needs.