> I didn't get that desire for purity that you gleaned from it.
'Folks who develop an allergic reaction to "big balls of mutable state without sum types" tend to gravitate towards languages that gives them control over mutability, lifetimes, and lets them build abstractions.'
This mutability argument is present throughout the article. Seems like nothing sans Rust or niche functional languages is enough.
> Nil pointer exceptions, for example, don't have to exist anymore..
The language most notorious for those is Java due to almost everything being passed via a nullable reference. When everything can be nullable, how can you know where to check for it? Go addresses this to an extent by explicitly separating pointers from values. Values are the default and cannot be nil, so the opportunity for null dereferences is greatly diminished. It's not a perfect solution, but it's not nothing either.
> and yet they do in Go because they couldn't be bothered to add sum types.
Damn those lazy Go devs!
> Its type system is barely a step above a dynamic language.
Turns out even a basic type system is a huge improvement over none. Just being able to restrict values to concrete types goes a long way.
> You have to write the same imperative looping code over and over because Rob Pike would rather just use a for loop than something mildly expressive like map or filter (https://github.com/robpike/filter).
There are arguments to be made either way, but I definitely agree generics (along with iterators) should have been there since day 1.
> Every function that does meaningful work is littered with if err != nil { return err }.
One big positive of this that I don't see in other languages is every `return` in a function must be on the start of a line. That is, every single exit path of a function is easily findable by visually scanning
the start of each line for `return`.
> you can't encode invariants explicitly
I'm curious, are there any limitations here besides enums/sum types?
'Folks who develop an allergic reaction to "big balls of mutable state without sum types" tend to gravitate towards languages that gives them control over mutability, lifetimes, and lets them build abstractions.'
This mutability argument is present throughout the article. Seems like nothing sans Rust or niche functional languages is enough.
> Nil pointer exceptions, for example, don't have to exist anymore..
The language most notorious for those is Java due to almost everything being passed via a nullable reference. When everything can be nullable, how can you know where to check for it? Go addresses this to an extent by explicitly separating pointers from values. Values are the default and cannot be nil, so the opportunity for null dereferences is greatly diminished. It's not a perfect solution, but it's not nothing either.
> and yet they do in Go because they couldn't be bothered to add sum types.
Damn those lazy Go devs!
> Its type system is barely a step above a dynamic language.
Turns out even a basic type system is a huge improvement over none. Just being able to restrict values to concrete types goes a long way.
> You have to write the same imperative looping code over and over because Rob Pike would rather just use a for loop than something mildly expressive like map or filter (https://github.com/robpike/filter).
There are arguments to be made either way, but I definitely agree generics (along with iterators) should have been there since day 1.
> Every function that does meaningful work is littered with if err != nil { return err }.
One big positive of this that I don't see in other languages is every `return` in a function must be on the start of a line. That is, every single exit path of a function is easily findable by visually scanning the start of each line for `return`.
> you can't encode invariants explicitly
I'm curious, are there any limitations here besides enums/sum types?