It depends on the level of abstraction with which the language was designed.
Go was designed for systems programming, and the code is intentionally verbose. A few extra characters, brackets, and syntactic constructs are a small price to pay for more control in performance-critical applications.
JavaScript was designed for the web to make authoring interactive pages easier. The web benefits as an ecosystem to have commonly-used abstractions for lower-level data transformations and common tasks.
So yes, there are reasons why a map shorthand is not needed. Mostly because it doesn't do anything a loop cannot, and the ecosystem in which it was developed does not benefit from it.
A systems programming language would never come with a baked-in, hardcoded garbage collector incapable of soft realtime applications and such a limited scope in utility, not such a constrained set of concurrency primitives and such a basic type system.
Seriously; LuaJIT achieves greater performance and has more abstractions in place; Rust fills the niche of systems programming languages easily.
I just fail to see the long-term utility of Go in a space where you have upcoming, high-performance languages like Julia and Rust, all while V8 and asm.js continue to improve in performance, LuaJIT wipes the floor in sheer speed for a dynamically typed language, C++ gets saner abstractions every day and the Erlang VM gets such a nice language as Elixir in the space of critical distributed apps.
Go would be interesting if you were at least getting something interesting out of that garbage collector in terms of type system goodness; as it stands Go is only slightly safer than C in that regard.
And by the way: what the hell does not having a Map() function have anything to do with performance? C++11 has std::transform which goes as fast as anything else. Any functional traversal of data structures can be trivially turned into an internal representation with the same performance characteristics as a loop. It's the biggest cop out ever.
> A systems programming language would never come with a baked-in, hardcoded garbage collector incapable of soft realtime applications and such a limited scope in utility, not such a constrained set of concurrency primitives and such a basic type system.
- Mesa/Cedar (Xerox PARC)
- Modula-3 (Compaq/Olivetti)
- Oberon/Active Oberon (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology)
Something that gets lost in the use of "System Language" is that the language was intended to make systems like a web server. This can have a garbage collector since it can pause a bit.
> It depends on the level of abstraction with which the language was designed.
> Go was designed for systems programming, and the code is intentionally verbose. A few extra characters, brackets, and syntactic constructs are a small price to pay for more control in performance-critical applications.
Rust offers more fine-grained control over memory, and things like map, filter etc. are more idiomatic than straight for-loops. They are implemented in a way that makes it a zero-cost abstraction compared to regular for-loops.
Generally I think Rust and Go gets compared too much, since they are very different languages both technically and philosophically. But the claim that things like map, filter etc. is unsuitable in a systems programming language (and Rust's definition of 'systems' has more stringent requirements than Go's definition of 'systems') is clearly false.
Go was designed for systems programming, and the code is intentionally verbose. A few extra characters, brackets, and syntactic constructs are a small price to pay for more control in performance-critical applications.
JavaScript was designed for the web to make authoring interactive pages easier. The web benefits as an ecosystem to have commonly-used abstractions for lower-level data transformations and common tasks.
So yes, there are reasons why a map shorthand is not needed. Mostly because it doesn't do anything a loop cannot, and the ecosystem in which it was developed does not benefit from it.