[TUHS] more about Brian...

[Steve Nickolas]

On Fri, 4 Feb 2022, Andy Kosela wrote:

> I used to be a big proponent of Go back in 2010.  The language
> definitely felt fresh and minimal back then when Java and C++ were
> dominant on the market.  And it definitely felt like the authors of Go
> wanted to replace them .  It made sense in the Google environment, but
> very soon people realized that you can't write everything in Go.
> Garbage collector is cool but actually it prevents you from writing
> kernel or performance critical code, e.g. games.
>
> But Go became popular anyway.  A lot of substandard PHP and New Age
> programmers started using it and it showed.  In the beginning the
> humble authors of Go preferred minimal variable names and less than 80
> char lines.  In time all this turned into Java-like long, expressive
> variable names and extremely long lines.  I really hate lines longer
> than 80 chars...in any language.  They are really hard to focus as you
> need to constantly move your eyes from left to right.  The same
> phenomenon happens with very wide browser windows.

I tend to prefer to keep everything to 77-79 when I'm actually formatting 
code for releases as opposed to "just don't care".

> And due to popular demand they started to add on to the language
> features: modules, generics, etc..  The language still feels a lot
> less bloated than C++, but IMHO plain old C just feels more natural
> and minimal.

I tend to feel that C strikes a perfect balance between minimalist and 
powerful.

> And because I still program on a lot of old retro systems today I
> returned back to C.  You can use C on pretty much everything -- from
> 8-bit machines to amd64.  You can't say the same about Go.

Same.

I mean, I've started to pick up 8086 assembler, but I can write C, I can 
code for my Apple //e, or I can code for my AMD64 boxen, or for my old 
PS/2, or theoretically for my ancient Macintoshes...or a number of other 
systems.  It's not quite "write once run everywhere", but it's pretty 
close.

-uso.