Beyond the Hype: 4 Years of Go in Production
infoq.com
infoq.com
Mainly, he said, rolling back on code or updating is just putting the binary on the server and run this. This means a downtime in the service. Which might be pretty harsh for a real time data logging and messaging service. With Erlang, and it's hot code reloading feature, this would be a non-issue.
Also when he talked about the system rarely crashing, could have also been better addressed with Erlang, as it is part of the main philosophy to deal with this.
I think Erlang would have been an even better choice for this company.
Apparently they didn't even deeply looked into the language, and as the discussion with one of the first commenters (which could be barely heard unfortunately) shows, that Erlang might have been another good choice, but it seemed to be a greater risk for them than going the go route.
It is interesting that a pro point for Go was for him because it was backed by Google. This apparently was one pro to go with the risk of the language, which, regarding Erlang, being backed by Ericsson, was NOT a pro.
For this company it worked out good going the Go route, and there is nothing wrong with that, it just seems that going the other risk with Erlang, and actually having put in the work to properly research it, might have been an even better step into the software, and the downsides that are apparent through the presentation and the half sentences you could understand from the discussion with the first commenter.
His answer was "It's JavaScript", and "Performance is good, but it's still JavaScript". Does not explain at all why.
Could have made the same point with Java, but there he actually gave explanations for it.
So why the JavaScript hate? I don't want to start a language war here, but a professional explanation that explains the decission, apart from that bully answer, would be interesting.