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Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang (2022)

In the two years since I've posted I want off Mr Golang's Wild Ride, it's made the rounds time and time again, on Reddit, on Lobste.rs, on HackerNews, and elsewhere. And every time, it elicits the ...

And since, just like C and Java, you do not get to decide what is mutable and what is immutable (the const keyword in C is essentially advisory, kinda), passing a reference to something (to avoid a costly copy, for example) is fraught with risk, like it getting mutated from under you, or it being held somewhere forever, preventing it from being freed (a lesser, but very real, problem). Because it has been decided that abstractions are for academics and fools, and all you really need is slices and maps and channels and funcs and structs, it becomes extremely hard to follow what any program is doing at a high level, because everywhere you look, you get bogged down in imperative code doing trivial data manipulation or error propagation. Because there is a lot to like in Go at first, because it's so easy to pick up, but so hard to move away from, and because the cost of choosing it in the first place reveals itself slowly over time, and compounds, only becoming unbearable when it's much too late, this is not a discussion we can afford to ignore as an industry.

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