Java, JavaScript, PHP, C# and ActionScript each got pretty good traction within their first six years as new languages. So did Ruby amongst the language community (of Japanese speakers) it originated from. As others have mentioned, Swift has had a good adoption rate.
maybe not specific to language, but compared to projects like Angular, React etc... Go has much less traction. Swift is a new language and is already much more widely used.
Not going to debate your claim, but Swift is an unfair comparison, as it is practically forced upon you if you want develop for one of the most important platforms today (you can of course still write stuff in objC, but Apple has made it clear that you'd better learn Swift).
In a golang conference, the presenter talking about youtube's vitess said:
"If vitess servers are down, then youtube is down. That's how golang is crucial for youtube"
What the heck are you talking about. Who uses Swift on this sort of scale? This is just one of the many MANY large companies using Go to power their core infrastructure.
Go brings some good things to the table, yes. I've seen it's popularity rise in recent years, but it seems to be rising slowly. There are a ton of companies that can be listed for almost every technology.
Node is another technology I would put ahead of Go as far as adoption. Maybe Go will get better, to me, it's too different than a lot of what I see day to day with Java, C#, Python, JavaScript and on and on. The part I love about Go is that it handles garbage collection, other than that, it's atrocious looking C like code.
> Go brings some good things to the table, yes. I've seen it's popularity rise in recent years, but it seems to be rising slowly. There are a ton of companies that can be listed for almost every technology.
Then name any company using Swift to the level Dropbox uses Go, or retract your claim.
Go code looks nothing like C other than general brace styling. I can't decide if you're trolling or just genuinely this ignorant.
I've had this message several times, but "What the heck are you talking about" doesn't break any rule whatsoever that I can find. In fact I fail to see how it could be toned down anymore. Are we not permitted to express confusion? Is 'heck' not the lightened American friendly version of 'hell'?
How much more would you like me to blunt what I say in order that it doesn't violate unclear rules?
What you posted was uncivil. "What are you talking about" adds no information and is a variant of name-calling. Asking whether someone is "trolling or ignorant" is also name-calling, just with a branch in it. And "name X or retract your claim" is a form of intellectual bullying, so also uncivil.
Any substantive point you have will become sharper once you edit such rudeness out, so it isn't a question of "blunting", but of being respectful. Even if you don't respect the person you're talking to, you need to respect the community by holding yourself to a higher standard.
>Go code looks nothing like C other than general brace styling.
I disagree. The one thing that makes Go code look more like C than other C descendants like Java, C#, JavaScript, Swift and even to some degree C++ is its error handling style. Having a seperate error value is of course a big improvement over C but visually the error checking code following many statements appears a lot like C.
And the second reason is that Go has pointers with a syntax modelled after C.
So in the eyes of the 90% or so developers who have been using mostly Java, JavaScript and C# for 15 or 20 years, Go has to look a lot like C.
Just stating my opinion, not trying to troll. I said "C like" because it is very much different than any C like language I'm used to. Dropbox was using Python as a main technology stack not that long ago so I'm not all that surprised they are seeing huge gains using Go. If Go gains more traction I'll consider using it, until that time, 6 years have gone by and I personally haven't seen anybody asking for Go in the Washington DC metro area.
> Dropbox was using Python as a main technology stack not that long ago so I'm not all that surprised they are seeing huge gains using Go
They still use Python if you read down the Twitter thread, but I can name so many more. Cloudflare for example.
The likely reason you see such a difference is that the languages are suited to different things. Swift for example is all but mandatory for iOS apps, and so this is not adoption but migration. If you're just looking for small freelance projects then I expect Go will be a long time coming, but if you're looking for large infrastructure work you'll find an awful lot of people very interested in Go.
Angular...React, are you serious?
Haven't even tried Go tbh but I wouldn't even dare to make such a comparison on HN or anywhere else for that matter. You just don't do it. It's like saying that Go sucks, google maps is better.
Who cares about adoption rate? Is PHP the best language to make websites because of it's popularity? Hell no!
I tell you what I care (and I know I will eventually pick Go for these reasons):
- concurrency
- parallelism
- stability
- speed
- community
- libraries
- proper use of hardware
- small footprint
Go's syntax is pretty much C-like though. Try comparing Go to Lisp, Pascal, Python, Visual Basic, COBOL, FORTH, etc etc.
But at the end of the day, syntax is really just a superficial element of a language. Particularly when you're comparing Go with very syntactically similar languages such as Java, JS and C#.
Actually one of the guiding principles of Go's design is that syntax is anything but superficial. It affects nearly all aspects of your design. Everything from the parser to the compiler to the stdlib. Syntax is the UI/UX of your language. Dismissing syntax as superficial is a mistake.
Imperative languages really aren't massively different in the grand scheme of things. Sure, some are more OO than others, different type systems, and so forth. But you do more or less tackle the same problems with similar kinds of solutions. So a lot of the time, the syntax changes are relatively superficial compared to the complete mindset change you require if you were to tackle the same problem with a LISP, or Prolog, stack-based languages, or even a procedural SQL (albeit to a lesser extent).
I do welcome the breadth of choice we have in programming languages, but sometimes we get too caught up on the finites of one language of a particular sub-genre when compared to another language of the same sub-genre. Particularly when a good programmer should be more interested in coding good logic and thus understand the paradigms enough to swap between the different languages of the same ilk with relative ease.
