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because I'm doing a little tour of programming languages, for reasons, I did sit down and read a bunch of examples of Go and... is it possible for a programming language to be *bland*?

i'm a designer so obviously I can't not think that aesthetics matters even in as utterly functional an object as a programming language, but it's not just aesthetics. it's also just like... the entire thing so clearly exists for 2% code-crunching efficiency gains in B2B CRUD code

just turning this artifact in my hands, psychometrically determining that no one at any point in making it held within themselves the capacity for joy

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obviously larry wall and matsumoto emphasized a sense of joy and humanity in what they made. both haskell and typescript are expressions of a genuine love for stupid category theory tricks. obviously brendan eich was coked out of his gills and van rossum got off on being a sadist.

go is like... an extruded corporate product. it's Just Java Again But We'll Get It Right This Time. There's nothing *wrong* with it, it's just... eeeagh

I look at it and I just cannot articulate what the vision is for it. Most languages have a vision. Haskell is about exploring ideas about type systems and purity. Perl is about mapping natural language ideas to programming. Python is about not having effective language constructs to do anything.

Like, I hate python. I hate python a whole lot. but at least that's a feeling. at least that has meaning. I look at Go and I feel nothing. I think Go is the only language LLMs should be allowed to write

I (somewhat facetiously) thought the "vision" of Go was that you could take a fresh CS grad and get them writing web services with lots of concurrency, and they would actually be fairly productive with it

it’s nice to know i’m not the only one who absolutely despises python meaningful white space! can’t believe people put up with that shit. that’s like a shit test

oh yeah I utterly hate python. the fact that python "won" over perl is one of my many indicators that we live in hell. absolutely stupid language. if you're going to make a language where there's only one construct to do a given thing maybe pick constructs that aren't shit

I find it objectively insane that a high-level language without `map()` was ever seriously used for any purpose, let alone that it became as important as it is. and let's not even get started on how fucking hard it is to install a working python runtime just to run other people's programs...

remembering back when Rob Pike said that he didn't use syntax highlighting for the Go Playground because it was "juvenile" > Syntax highlighting is juvenile. When I was a child, I was taught arithmetic using colored rods. I grew up and today I use monochromatic numerals.