WAIT, GO BACK

To mature as programmers, newer generations need to take a lesson from Google’s programming language.

- SHEON HAN

MANY OF TODAY's programmersexcuse me, software engineers-consider themselves "creatives." Artists of a sort. They are given to ostentatious personal websites with cleverly hidden Easter eggs and parallax scrolling; they confer upon themselves multihyphenate job titles ("ex-Amazon-engineer-investorauthor") and crowd their laptops with identity-signaling vinyl stickers. Some regard themselves as literary sophisticates. Consider the references smashed into certain product names: Apache Kafka, ScyllaDB, Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

Much of that, I admit, applies to me. The difference is I'm a tad short on talents to hyphenate, and my toy projectswith names like "Nabokov" (I know, I know) are better off staying on my laptop. I entered this world pretty much the moment software engineering overtook banking as the most reviled profession. There's a lot of hatred, and self-hatred, to contend with.

Perhaps this is why I see the ethos behind the programming language Go as both a rebuke and a potential corrective to my generation of strivers. Its creators hail from an era when programmers had smaller egos and fewer commercial ambitions, and it is, for my money, the premier general-purpose language of the new millennium-not the best at any one thing, but nearly the best at nearly everything. A model for our flashy times.

IF I WERE to categorize programming languages like art movements, there would be mid-century utilitarianism (Fortran, COBOL), high-theory formalism (Haskell, Agda), Americorporate pragmatism (C#, Java), grassroots communitarianism (Python, Ruby), and esoteric hedonism (Befunge, Brainfuck). And I'd say Go, often described as "C for the 21st century," represents neoclassicism: not so much a revolution as a throwback.