So, I don’t code in Go and have no intention to. But my impression was that Go is intentionally simplistic. Now I read about this
iotakeyword, which seems like such a niche thing to include into the language, like what the heck. Is there any other use for it, aside from creating pseudo-enums?Nope. Of all the silly things to include in an intentionally pared-down language, iota is maybe the dumbest thing in the language. I think the purpose was to provide a default value, because one of the things that was talked up when the language was young was how every variable had a default value - there were no undefined values for any types. But honestly, I don’t know; it seems a waste.
And I say this as someone who still hasn’t personally found a better language than Go, except maybe C99. The language has warts, but at least - unlike a commonly compared and currently popular language - it doesn’t look like it fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. And I believe Go’s remaining warts will be resolved, eventually.
