The Real Reason I Avoid Go Lang

Ah, the eternal civil war among programmers trying to get the size of something. Is it count() ? size() ? length ? sizeof() ? len() ? Every damn language and library decided to pick their own favorite, and now we're all just Spider-Men pointing at each other in confusion. Nothing says "I'm a seasoned developer" like muscle memory making you type the wrong size function in every language and then cursing under your breath when the IDE throws a red squiggly line. Consistency? In programming? That's a good joke!

Someone reports a compilation error, and the developer asks to see the code. The user then shares perfectly valid Go code that literally just prints "compilation error" to the console. So there's no actual compilation error—the program is working exactly as intended by printing the words "compilation error". The developer successfully reproduced the bug: the bug being that the user doesn't understand the difference between a compiler error and a string being printed. Classic case of a PEBKAC situation where the issue isn't the code, it's the carbon-based life form operating the keyboard. The code compiles fine, runs fine, and does exactly what it says it does. 10/10 bug report.

The question "what are you writing in?" used to have a straightforward answer—Java for enterprise, JavaScript for web, maybe C++ if you were doing systems work. But now? WebAssembly is running in browsers, Rust is eating everything, Go is handling backend services, and Python somehow does both AI and scripting. The joke hits because even developers themselves can't keep up with the tech stack explosion. When someone asks what you're coding in, you might genuinely need to consult your "agent" (whether that's your AI coding assistant, your manager, or literally just checking which terminal tab you're in). The response "will have to ask my agent" is both absurd and relatable—we've reached peak abstraction where developers are so removed from the metal that they're not even sure what language their code will compile to anymore. Fun fact: With tools like Copilot and ChatGPT writing chunks of code, some devs really ARE asking their "agent" what language they should use. The future is weird.

Developers love to brag about their favorite language having first-class functions like it's some revolutionary feature that makes them superior beings. Meanwhile, literally every modern programming language since the 90s: "Yeah, we have that too." JavaScript, Python, Rust, Go, even Java got with the program eventually. It's like being proud your car has wheels. Sure, functional programming is cool and all, but acting like your language invented the concept of passing functions around is peak programmer delusion. Newsflash: functions as values aren't a personality trait, they're just... standard equipment at this point.

The Go team really said "let's add generics after 13 years of the language existing" and "sure, interfaces are cool" while completely ghosting proper error handling. Meanwhile, developers are still out here writing if err != nil until their fingers bleed. Every. Single. Function. The skeleton at the bottom of the pool? That's every Go dev who's been waiting for a decent error handling mechanism since 2009. Some say they're still checking for nil errors to this day. The Go team keeps promising improvements but then gets distracted by adding yet another way to format strings or optimize the garbage collector by 0.3 nanoseconds. At least we got generics though... only took them longer than it takes to build an entire JavaScript framework from scratch (which happens about every 2 weeks).

The ancient one sits upon the throne, watching over the mortals who dare not speak its name directly. Assembly language—the primordial tongue from which all programming languages descended. C and C++ stand as the closest disciples, worthy enough to be at the ruler's side. Meanwhile, the younger languages—JavaScript, Python, Rust, Go, Swift, Zig, C#, and Java—kneel in supplication, knowing they're just fancy abstractions built atop the eldritch knowledge they fear to touch. Nothing humbles a React developer faster than having to debug a memory allocation issue at the Assembly level. Suddenly all those npm packages don't seem so impressive anymore.