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I used to ask interviewees, “What’s your favorite programming language?” The answer was nearly always, “I just choose the right language for the job.” Duh. Does anyone ever deliberately pick the wrong language? This was clearly a way to avoid actually naming a language for fear of picking one I didn’t like.
When I first started programming in Go, my summary of it was, “The good things are great and the bad things are weird and I can live with them.” After another three years and a few large projects in Go, I no longer like the language and wouldn’t use it for a new project. Here are 10 reasons why, in no particular order.
My friend Clift Norris has identified a fundamental constant that I call Norris’ number, the average amount of code an untrained programmer can write before he or she hits a wall. Clift estimates this as 1,500 lines. Beyond that the code becomes so tangled that the author cannot debug or modify it without herculean…
After a minute Patrick came back with a small dusty cardboard box. Dave and I stared as Patrick opened it and pulled out a network switch, the old kind from the days when they were made with metal cases. He plugged in the power supply and carefully straightened out a CAT -5 cable to hook the switch up to our network…
“If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to start with.” —Edsger Dijkstra, Turing Award Lecture (1972)