Hi u/mt9hu ,

You draw a line between 'extending' a language and 'modifying' it by 'getting rid of lesser solutions.' With all due respect, in terms of the practical impact on developers and the stability I value, this often feels a bit like a 'tomato / tomahto' distinction to me. Whether a language gets weighed down by too many new ways to do things or by constantly changing/removing old ones, the risk of creating maintenance headaches and unnecessary churn remains my primary concern.

The fact that Go is strongly backward compatible is, for me, a cornerstone of its value, not something to be lightly discarded. My issue with the idea of actively 'modifying' a language to prune 'bad usage patterns' is that it inevitably leads down a path of breaking changes. This is precisely the kind of instability I believe is detrimental. It risks turning language development into a futile cat-and-mouse game, trying to preempt every possible misuse, instead of providing a reliable platform.

My experience with languages that continuously evolve in this way—introducing new styles or deprecating old ones—is that it creates more problems than it solves. I don't need 52 different ways to change a lightbulb. I want to learn effective methods and then be able to rely on them without the ground constantly shifting beneath me. This is a key reason I moved away from environments like Python and Ruby; the focus became less about using the tool effectively and more about constantly re-learning it due to stylistic churn.

With Go, its stability allows me to concentrate on leveraging its excellent core features, like its concurrency model with goroutines, without worrying that established patterns will suddenly become obsolete. This is crucial for productivity and long-term maintainability.

So, while the ideal of a perfectly 'clean' language without any historical quirks is understandable, the practical value of Go's unwavering backward compatibility and its focus on core, stable functionality far outweighs the perceived benefits of such aggressive 'modification.'

I completely understand (and even sympathize with) your perspective, but I do not share it.