Thread by @perrymetzger

@kaepora @golang Go is a fine quality circa 1990 programming language design, dating from before people knew much about type theory and before people knew much about functional programming. For a 1990-style language it's pretty good.

@kaepora @golang The sad thing about the Go effort was that the people who designed Go talk a lot in other contexts about the importance of learning from the theory people. That did not, however, apply for talking to the people who do programming languages theory.

@kaepora @golang Go could have been an amazing language. For example, it could have provided safe concurrency (which it doesn't). It could have had algebraic data types. It could have had pattern matching, proper tail recursion, etc. All of those things would have been strict improvements.

@kaepora @golang The creators don't understand why you would want those things, or don't think they're particularly important, and also don't think the people who do understand have anything to teach them. However, programming language research has advanced in the last four decades.

@kaepora @golang I know this impulse to think I know better very well, because I often suffer from it myself. But luckily, I have friends who slap me with a halibut when that happens. I believe the Go design team needed a halibut-slapper.