To be honest I kinda hate the reply to “X is like Y” comment when someone says “X is not like Y because of difference Z”. It's just… so pedantic. The whole reason we say “X is like Y” instead of “X is the same as Y” is because X is not the same as Y. I’m just really tired of seeing this response on HN over and over. I was pretty damn explicit when I said “more or less” and you’re here to argue about whether it is legal for me to say “more or less” in this context. I mean, geez, what a drag.
If you talk about how Go slices are tricky for beginners, but you cite C++ as some kind of gold standard against which Go should be compared, then I think you’ve lost the plot—C++’s type system is a complete and utter trash fire for people who are new to programming. Rust, as well, is very difficult for people to get into. Even the Python semantics for lists get people tripped up all the time.
a = [[]] * 5
b = [[] for _ in range(5)]
I bring this up because there is no language that gets things right for beginners and still provides the tools which professional programmers expect to have. And if you want to pick an example of a language that is particularly bad for beginners, C++ is it. C++ is shit for beginners. Complete shit. I bring up the Python example because it’s something I’m always explaining to people who are learning Python—Python is ok, but slicing in Python creates new arrays containing a copy of the slice's contents.
The nuances of how references and values work is something that you have to work through, and then you have to come to terms with the conventions for the particular language you are using. IMO, Go’s slices are fine… you really just have to be careful about aliasing a slice you don’t own, but then again, that’s true for languages like C++, Python, Java, and C# as well. Rust is the only one that’s really different here.
> The whole reason we say “X is like Y” instead of “X is the same as Y” is because X is not the same as Y
Being able to change the underlying data is a pretty big difference. Technically, their only solid common point is that they address contiguous spaces in memory.
> you cite C++ as some kind of gold standard
I never did; I highlighted the difference between immutable views vs. whatever Go slices are.
In this scenario, we are comparing two cars, a bicycle, a jet ski, and three types of airplane. Yes, the cars are similar, within that context. Many languages, like Python and Java, do not have an array slice type. And the similarities between C++, Rust, and Go are relevant—the length is a property of the slice itself, and since the slice is passed by value, it is not modified by a function that accepts a slice as an argument, even if the objects the slice point to are modified by that function.
If you see a different context, then you misinterpreted what I wrote.
It is easy—trivial, even—to imagine scenarios where a particular “X is like Y” does not make sense. What you should do, as a reader, is try and understand what the writer means, rather than try to figure out some way to interpret a comment so that it is wrong, in your view.
The easy way out—saying “X is not like Y because of difference Z”—does not meaningfully contribute to the discussion.
If you talk about how Go slices are tricky for beginners, but you cite C++ as some kind of gold standard against which Go should be compared, then I think you’ve lost the plot—C++’s type system is a complete and utter trash fire for people who are new to programming. Rust, as well, is very difficult for people to get into. Even the Python semantics for lists get people tripped up all the time.
I bring this up because there is no language that gets things right for beginners and still provides the tools which professional programmers expect to have. And if you want to pick an example of a language that is particularly bad for beginners, C++ is it. C++ is shit for beginners. Complete shit. I bring up the Python example because it’s something I’m always explaining to people who are learning Python—Python is ok, but slicing in Python creates new arrays containing a copy of the slice's contents.The nuances of how references and values work is something that you have to work through, and then you have to come to terms with the conventions for the particular language you are using. IMO, Go’s slices are fine… you really just have to be careful about aliasing a slice you don’t own, but then again, that’s true for languages like C++, Python, Java, and C# as well. Rust is the only one that’s really different here.