And nothing says that go wouldn't have been more successful had they added those features. In the final analysis, the relationship between the success of a language and any intrinsic qualities is very hard to qualify. But IMO, the success is not a good measure of wether or not the criticism of go were/are valid.
> Go made me truly realize how insufferable the PLT community is
Agree PLT folks can be a passionate bunch, i am not sure they are any worst to any other online community.
> and why they are so absolutely lost when it comes to creating successful languages.
Depends on who you include in the PLT group :
- C# and typescript were design by Anders Hejlsberg , arguably the most successful language designer - Scala is also pretty successful and really tied to the PLT community - Kotlin by JetBrain, Dart started with Gilan Bracha
Not to mentioned the wide range of features seen in most recent language (async-await, reactive programming for msft research) etc... etc...
The fight between pragmatic and simple language vs complex and expressive language is not happening outside the PLT, we have proponent of both ways of thinking inside the community. Not everyone in the PLT is pushing for overly complex theoretical approaches.
But more importantly, let's not forget the 1000's of engineer quietly implementing the compiler, libraries etc... that make go, or any other language possible.
Back to go, my personal gripe with go wasn't the decisions they made, but the rational given for those decisions.
Take the most famous example of not including generics. Designing a good generic type system is a very complicated task, and if the team had come out and say they didn't want generics because they didn't have the bandwidth or the know-how to do so, i wouldn't have care. But the rational given, describing generics as border line useless, or somehow too hard for the average programmer to grasp not only fly against basically 25 years of programming language history, but were just plain rediculous.
