Rys Sommefeldt

Try programming languages for longer

Go’s impending version 1 status has caused myriad programmers to come out of the woodwork to posit why the language is good or bad, usually compared to their favourite programming language. After a few years of development, it’s clear just from looking at the community that the language solves some real-world problems and is useful in myriad ways, and is no longer a toy or research project.

So I don’t get the, “I used it for a short time and wrote programs in my comfort zone and decided it wasn’t better than [insert favourite language here]”, positions that are generally pushed. The typical period seems to be a few hours to a few days, before publishing why it’s going to fail because it can’t beat what the positor is already happy with in some — usually woefully understated — metric.

I can’t learn anything from you if you do that, where you give me no detail or facts and just push your prototypical opinion. It doesn’t matter if the person weilding that opinion is someone with no programming experience, or if they’re Rich Hickey or SPJ or Linus; I can only learn from them if they truly used it to write something with more than trivial complexity and explained what happened. Doing so takes time.

So if you have the urge to talk about a new programming language you haven’t spent more than a cursory amount of time with, and especially if you’ve never written and executed any code with it before, don’t tell me about it, even if your position is positive. I only want to hear any position when you’ve actually used it. Only then can I learn something useful that I couldn’t myself after similar cursory effort.