Such a weird thing to frame this in terms of the Blub Paradox. Regardless of what you think about the paradox, this is what it states:
> But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn’t realize he’s looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub.
It's very, very hard to argue Go is "up the power continuum" from Haskell, or that Haskell is a Blub language compared to Go. Everything else can be debatable, but surely not this.
He could have simply said "I was arrogant about Go, and need to look at it from a fresh perspective instead of comparing it to a language I'm more familiar with", no appeals to Blub needed.
The Blub Paradox is flat-out wrong. To see why, just look at Haskell and Lisp.
When a Lisp user looks at Haskell, they are sure they're looking down, because Haskell doesn't have macros. But when a Haskell type (pun intended) looks at Lisp, they are also sure that they're looking down, because Lisp doesn't have a decent (Hindley-Milner) type system.
This situation - two languages, each sure that they're above the other - shows the problem. You cannot rank languages on a one-dimensional axis called power.
Another way of getting there is to ask: Power? Power for what? For writing programs. What kind of programs? General programs? I've never written a general program in my life. I've written a bunch of specific ones, though. What I care about is power to write this program - the one I'm currently trying to write. (Why do I care about a language's power to write a program that I'm not trying to write?)
Instead, think in terms of yak shaving. What are the yak shaving aspects of the program I'm trying to write? Think of that as a vector in a multi-dimensional space. Think of languages as branches on a tree. Which branch extends farthest in the direction of the yak-shaving vector? Use that language.
But you have to have kind of an expanded idea of what "yak shaving" means. In particular, if you pick a "non standard" language, training your team becomes part of the yak shaving.
I think he's not saying Golang is up the power continuum, but that languages like Idris and Coq are up the power continuum. He doesn't bother learning those because he's "stuck".
Also interesting: it's his only article tagged Go, from 2017. He never mentions Go again. Since he has several more articles about Haskell, I wonder if he eventually quit his job, or whether he simply didn't have anything else to say about Go.
> But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn’t realize he’s looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub.
It's very, very hard to argue Go is "up the power continuum" from Haskell, or that Haskell is a Blub language compared to Go. Everything else can be debatable, but surely not this.
He could have simply said "I was arrogant about Go, and need to look at it from a fresh perspective instead of comparing it to a language I'm more familiar with", no appeals to Blub needed.