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I am completely in support of Haskell and functional languages in general. There are some gaps in Go and definitely some glaring problems. But this comparison a

I am completely in support of Haskell and functional languages in general. There are some gaps in Go and definitely some glaring problems. But this comparison also only lists the bad. Go is good for what it was intended for which is concurrent programming and server/web application. Just a note: I don't think it is fair to say Go has absolutely no immutability as it was defined, it does have "const". See http://golang.org/ref/spec#Constant_expressions http://golang.org/ref/spec#Constant_expressions

Dewie 12y ago
Yeah, this post seems to be most about general purpose language features, and not so much about stuff that is relevant to the niche Go is trying to carve for itself.
wyager 12y ago
>Go is good for what it was intended for which is concurrent programming and server/web application. I absolutely agree that Go is nice for writing web servers! However, there is no reason that it can't still be nice for that and also a well-designed language in general. For example, Haskell has awesome concurrency features, and writing a web server in Haskell is reasonably nice (not quite as nice as in Go, IMO).
AndreasFrom 12y ago
`const` is for compile-time constants where something like `let` in Rust can be used for values generated on the fly. The latter is immensely more powerful and actually provides the described benefits like guaranteeing that data is not changing under your feet. Edit: While `const PI = 3.1415…` is threadsafe, it's not very useful in comparison to runtime-immutability :)
- andrejewski 12y ago
  Yes, the guarantees provided by true immutability are not met by "const". I wrote the note loosely using the author's expectations and advantages of immutability, not the exact definition. But thank you for letting me clarify. Also I just noticed with Go's Unicode support we can write `const π = 3.14..` if we really wanted.

Dewie 12y ago

Yeah, this post seems to be most about general purpose language features, and not so much about stuff that is relevant to the niche Go is trying to carve for itself.

wyager 12y ago

>Go is good for what it was intended for which is concurrent programming and server/web application. I absolutely agree that Go is nice for writing web servers! However, there is no reason that it can't still be nice for that and also a well-designed language in general. For example, Haskell has awesome concurrency features, and writing a web server in Haskell is reasonably nice (not quite as nice as in Go, IMO).

AndreasFrom 12y ago

`const` is for compile-time constants where something like `let` in Rust can be used for values generated on the fly. The latter is immensely more powerful and actually provides the described benefits like guaranteeing that data is not changing under your feet. Edit: While `const PI = 3.1415…` is threadsafe, it's not very useful in comparison to runtime-immutability :)

andrejewski 12y ago
Yes, the guarantees provided by true immutability are not met by "const". I wrote the note loosely using the author's expectations and advantages of immutability, not the exact definition. But thank you for letting me clarify. Also I just noticed with Go's Unicode support we can write `const π = 3.14..` if we really wanted.