It's not really very pleasant if you are used to modern type systems. It feels antiquated in a limiting way, for no good reason.
With C at least it's clear to me that it's literally (very literally) a 50 years old language, and I've gotten used to it after decades. It's far from ideal, but at least there's some deep familiarity, and that coupled with the fact that it's everywhere makes me feel more tolerant of it.
But learning a new language which is, in some ways, stuck in the same past as that established 50 years old language is not very pleasing.
When a language has some property that surprises you, consider whether it might have been designed that way on purpose, not simply because the creators were ignorant/lazy/negligent/drunk/lost a bet/etc.
I did. Rob Pike said that Go was purposefully made similar to C (and by extension other languages similar to C), in order to be familiar and get new engineers who are already familiar with C or C-like languages to become productive without having to learn too much.
And while I can totally understand how that makes sense in the intended setting, I don't consider that pleasing at all. "Pleasing" for me implies that I like a thing because I like the thing itself, not because external constraints impose (perceived) limitations on other choices. Especially in this context, where we were talking about learning and using a programming language by choice, instead of assembling a team of programmers from an already common pool.
I think your critique, if you examine it closely and deeply, is fundamentally an arrogant one. Sorry for the harsh claim, but I truly do believe this.
You are a new developer too. Everyone is. When it’s easy to learn something, it’s easy to relearn it, and it’s easy to learn things around it (because you don’t devote as much brain to the language).
All languages should target new, dumb devs, because all devs (including Rob pike) are new and dumb.
I’ve certainly learned things that were harder and more time consuming to learn, for a payoff that was and continues to be well worth the effort. Including programming languages. I did not claim it was easier for me, so how is that arrogant?
And I absolutely reject the notion that an easy to learn programming language is better. Especially so because Go was made “easier to learn” in large parts by its similarity to C, so it’s really easier for people already and only familiar with C, and that was explicitly stated by the creators.
> creators were ignorant/lazy/negligent/drunk/lost a bet/etc.
This is not a well-intended comment, but then why didn't they add generics at the start? It's not like it was a surprise to anyone even remotely familiar with PLs that they will have to retrofit it sooner or later. Also, function-scoped defers instead of surrounding braces-based one? Come on...
Not adding generics, if you dig through the archives, was a pragmatic choice. Partly it was to help the process of language design, partly it was project management, and partly it was due to technical constraints. Generics is a big, complex feature. The team was prioritizing getting the most immediately valuable features shipped first, and didn’t want the introduction of generics to hit their limited resources too hard or distract from getting the fundamentals right. Generics implementations in existing languages at the time also made trade offs/interactions that weren’t appropriate for go.
That’s not how language design works. You can’t just postpone such an elementary feature with a TODO, it will interact with every other feature of the language, and if you haven’t left a place for the interactions you have to introduce breaking changes, which will shook the whole ecosystem.
There is zero point in postponing a feature so that you can build a community, which you will burn down later. It’s not a startup that has to be ready in X months or it will fail.
They were very clear about why generics weren't there for a long time -- they weren't sure how to do it and keep things simple and build quickly. I'm just a simple code monkey but I think they did a decent job with it.
Obviously we all have our preferences. I think of Go as the love child of C and Python. It's simple, batteries included, and has good tooling and is "good enough" for a lot of tasks (as evidenced by its adoption).
It is simple enough to learn quickly so the investment isn't that demanding. I'd like to learn Rust but the learning curve is much steeper and it seemed to be subject to changes. I'm not shitting on it, just lazy with too many distractions to hunker down and do a real investment of time into it. Someday.
With C at least it's clear to me that it's literally (very literally) a 50 years old language, and I've gotten used to it after decades. It's far from ideal, but at least there's some deep familiarity, and that coupled with the fact that it's everywhere makes me feel more tolerant of it.
But learning a new language which is, in some ways, stuck in the same past as that established 50 years old language is not very pleasing.