Really, they do: there a millions of us coding in those other languages just fine, and automatic formatting has been a thing for decade, and I'm not aware of a single language out there that doesn't have such a formatting tool.
The only exception with Go is that you cannot change the default settings. But that's it. In any other language you can use a code formatter with the default settings and the “speedbump in the way of automating formatting” you talk about doesn't exist anywhere but in your mind.
> where it can be relied upon to be present and so used in pre-commit hooks
You know that a failing git hook aborts the commit? So that with any language, if the formatter isn't installed in the machine, the commit cannot be performed, which means that the formatter can actually be relied upon anyway. In practice, the hardest part is making sure people all have the git hook installed (that's not that hard but that's the hardest part).
As I said before, Go has many useful properties, but automatic formatting is definitely not what makes Go relevant, and the endless stream of Gophers who argue this are just ridiculing themselves in front of everybody else.
> You know that a failing git hook aborts the commit? So that with any language, if the formatter isn't installed in the machine, the commit cannot be performed, which means that the formatter can actually be relied upon anyway.
When making a trivial fix PR to an upstream FOSS project, if I find that a missing third-party linter install has force-rejected my commit (that I know has correct syntax)... then I just give up on making that PR. I can't be assed to install some random linter. (Third-party linters have a history of being horrible to install†.)
Small amounts of friction can be enough to shape behavior (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory.) Aggregated over a large project's entire community, this can make an appreciable difference in code quality over time.
† Mind you, a linter that exists as a library dev dependency of the project is fine, too. I had to pull the deps to build and run the tests, so the linter will be there by the time I attempt to commit. It's just linters that are their whole own projects that give me a jaw-ache.
> and the endless stream of Gophers who argue this are just ridiculing themselves in front of everybody else.
I don't even use Go! I mainly write Elixir, actually. Which also has a built-in auto-formatter.
To me, the nice thing about the formatter being built into Elixir (and of-a-piece with the compiler), is that when I use macros, the purely-in-memory generated-and-compiled code can be inspected in the REPL, and shows as formatted (because it passes through the auto-formatter), rather than looking like AST gunk. Without having had to pay that auto-formatting cost at compile time (because that would also be a cost you'd pay at runtime codegen time, which you might do a lot of if you've built a domain-specific JIT on top of the macro system.)
It's easy for programmers to focus on the technical details and forget the big picture. The technical aspects of automatically formatting code are relatively easy to solve. The difficulty is in the social parts. That's what Go solved by bundling gofmt with the language.
As a result, almost all Go code out there is formatted the exact same way and nobody has ever had to have the dreaded code formatting discussion about Go at their company. Eliminating such bikeshedding for every user of the language is a solid win.
That's why all the languages proceeding Go have adopted the same approach, e.g. Rust and Zig. Python's Black formatter has been directly inspired by gofmt as well.
Really, they do: there a millions of us coding in those other languages just fine, and automatic formatting has been a thing for decade, and I'm not aware of a single language out there that doesn't have such a formatting tool.
The only exception with Go is that you cannot change the default settings. But that's it. In any other language you can use a code formatter with the default settings and the “speedbump in the way of automating formatting” you talk about doesn't exist anywhere but in your mind.
> where it can be relied upon to be present and so used in pre-commit hooks
You know that a failing git hook aborts the commit? So that with any language, if the formatter isn't installed in the machine, the commit cannot be performed, which means that the formatter can actually be relied upon anyway. In practice, the hardest part is making sure people all have the git hook installed (that's not that hard but that's the hardest part).
As I said before, Go has many useful properties, but automatic formatting is definitely not what makes Go relevant, and the endless stream of Gophers who argue this are just ridiculing themselves in front of everybody else.