On Tue, Apr 11, 2023, 09:15 Jan Mercl <0xj...@gmail.com> wrote: > Resending to the mailing list as that was my intention but I errored > again. Did the gmail UI changed again? > > ---------- Forwarded message --------- > From: Jan Mercl <0xj...@gmail.com> > Date: Tue, Apr 11, 2023 at 9:11 AM > Subject: Re: [go-nuts] Redfining loop variable semantics - what's the plan? > To: Axel Wagner <axel.wagner...@googlemail.com> > > > On Tue, Apr 11, 2023 at 7:46 AM 'Axel Wagner' via golang-nuts > <golang-nuts@googlegroups.com> wrote: > > > You shouldn't *have* to read the language spec to understand what Go > code does. > > This is the most strange claim I have read about Go ever. > > You *must* read the language spec to understand what any programming > language does. You *cannot* just guess because "other languages" do > somethíng or use similar approaches and then be surprised you have > guessed wrong. And as can be seen often, blame the language designers > they didn't meet your unfounded expectations. >
I disagree strongly. I've never read *any* language spec but the Go one, yet I can read most programs in many programming languages just fine. And I don't think that's at all uncommon. I know people who have been writing and maintaining widely used C software for 20 years or so, who I'm fairly certain habe never read the C spec (and I don't know many people who have). Really, Go is kind of an outlier for even *having* an approachable spec - again a sentiment I've heard a lot. I would expect any programmer who did the Go tour to be able to productively contribute to existing Go projects. Again, this is a strength and IMO explicit design goal of Go, to be easy to pick up and use productively. The spec exists to be able to disambiguate edge cases and answer questions about *why* a certain program behaves the way it does when you don't understand the behavior. Not to be a prerequisite to use the language. I strongly believe none of this is controversial. > What bothers me personally about the proposal and why I think it's a > bad idea: The semantics will be defined by metadata. Any Go code > snippet with such a loop, existing or future, all over the > Internet/books/blogs, ... will become ambiguous in what it does > without those metadata, which are not usually/always available > alongside. You can say "other languages have that problem as well, see > the different C, Perl, Python, you name it... versions". And you would > be right. The point is that the Go 1 compatibility promise gave us the > nice property of Go not suffering from such problems. > > I oppose the idea of introducing such a problem into the language > voluntarily, 10+ years later. > > Maybe it would be better to bite the bullet, introduce Go 2 and > embrace the shizma. /s > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "golang-nuts" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/CAA40n-UQaK1dBvo-690Z1VZDZ%2B%2BKL7gQGWi5Mq3G4x4mrxZuyg%40mail.gmail.com > . > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/CAEkBMfGVm5XqTPKSJN1qiH2g0pbDnDpxv-sR0Y43CHf0mb1Txg%40mail.gmail.com.
