this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025
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Go's syntax is vastly superior once you have more complicated signatures, then the left-to-right truly matters. For example a variable that contains a pointer to a function that takes a function and an int and returns another function (like a decorator).
In C the order becomes very hard to understand and you really have to read the thing several times to understand the type of fp:
int (*(*fp)(int (*)(int, int), int))(int, int)
In Go, you can just read from left to right and you can easily understand what f's type is:
f func(func(int,int) int, int) func(int, int) int
It's just much more readable.
See: https://go.dev/blog/declaration-syntax
If you actually use code like this you're insane.
This obviously just illustrates a point, but callbacks and decorators are not uncommon. And iterators are exactly like that:
Which is very readable.
Callbacks and decorators are fine, but callbacks/decorators to a function which itself takes a function pointer and returns another function pointer are crazy.
I've thankfully never had to use recursive callbacks or decorators, but it seems like it could very quickly become difficult to keep track of.
I don't think it's that uncommon. Let's say you have a function that handles a request. A common use case is to add permission checks before applying that function. You can write a generic permission check a bit like this:
This would allow you to separate the permission check logic from the business logic. Though to be fair, in Go they prefer to keep things as simple as possible but it's just to illustrate that these concepts are not that alien.