I would argue that Go's design as a whole is characterized by an attitude of ignoring established ideas for no other reason than that they think they know better.
Something being established is not a grand argument for it's usage. The reasons it got established are relavent, and if you feel the end result of said establishment is obtuse or inane, why would you use it?
That's not to say Go's decisions to toss some established practices are "wise" or "sagely", just that broad acceptance is not a criteria they seemed concerned with. Which is fine.
>they think they know better.
It's safe to say Rob Pike is not clueless or without experience in unix tooling. You should listen to some of his experiences and thoughts with designing Go [0]. I don't always agree with him, [but it's very baseless to suggest he makes decisions on the grounds that they were his, not they have merrit.]
Edit to clarify: [He makes decisions on merrit over authority]
Sure, there's nothing that says established practice is better. That is not, in my opinion, a good defense of Go which makes many baffling design decisions. Besides, an appeal to the authority of Rob Pike is surely not a valid defense if mine is not a valid criticism.
I'm (perhaps unfairly) uninterested in writing out all the details, but “they think they know better” is because I see Go as someone's attempt to update C to the modern world without considering the lessons of any of the languages developed in the meantime. And because of the weird dogmatic wars about generics, modules, and error handling.
Rob Pike explained it thusly in a 2013 Google Groups reply:
> Rob 'Commander' Pike
> Apr 2, 2013, 6:50:36 AM
> to rog, John Jeffery, golan...@googlegroups.com
> As the author of the flag package, I can explain. It's loosely based on Google's flag package, although greatly simplified (and I mean greatly). I wanted a single, straightforward syntax for flags, nothing more, nothing less.
This is a fair point, although ironically it's probably because Pike predates GNU and still has a problem with all the conventions those young upstarts eschewed. Conventions change, usually for the better. I think this is one the Go team got wrong, regardless of the reason.
