Why Go is skyrocketing in popularity | Hacker News Reader

Why Go is skyrocketing in popularity

opensource.com

30 pointsjcasman14 comments

"Superior error handling and easier debugging are helping it gain popularity over Python and R"

What the fuck are they talking about? I thought a "feature" of Go is that it DOESN'T have any error handling, and it forces you to catch exceptions yourself? Last I checked python already has a great solution for this built in.

Are you saying you prefer giant try catch blocks everywhere? I don't know python so not sure about how exceptions are handled there. I've switched from c# to go and in total I prefer go's style of error handling. The built in error type is lacking but there are plenty of packages that fill in the gaps.

If you program like that i'm sorry, you are doing it wrong. You really just need very few try catch blocks in a standard lob application, a few more if your are using some style of communication that requires it. If your code base is polluted with try blocks i think it's a mistake.

Of course Go has error handling. Thinking it doesn't shows lack of understanding of the language and its goals. Go's error handling is minimalist in order to fulfill the goal of making the code easy to read, understand and predict, in context of large software projects.

try/except in python doesn't fit that goal: looking at a line of code in python, one cannot with any reasonable level of confidence determine what types of exception could be raised, where they will be raised or if any, unless they read the documentation of the every method call that could happen by running that line.

Ah, the programming language hype train. There's always a new bandwagon to jump on, isn't there?

sure, there is always that. but here's another perspective. I basically only wrote C for decades. Except for some interesting side projects and playing around with research languages. Did projects in language de jour (i.e. Java) and hated it.

but now I program almost exclusively in go. because for almost everything I do, especially web services. I appreciate the completely and well thought out runtime.

the primary development team could be alot more friendly. i think the channels stuff isn't as useful as its supposed to be. the vendoring thing is still screwy.

but it saves me time, and tends to make more correct programs. thats enough.

Java saves me time and tends to make more correct programs, compared to C.

> Did projects in language de jour (i.e. Java) and hated it

Because there is one thing Go isn't is "le language du jour" (ou du mois) ??? Come on.

Personally, I'd still be betting on Java which has really become better and simpler to work with/deploy compared to 10 years ago, it's especially true for web apps, and has the largest ecosystem of all languages. Go is nice, but has a poor ecosystem for enterprise integration, its type system is the reason why it will never replace languages such as Java.

Come jump on my new Perl bandwagon, plenty of room... :(

Mentions "engineered" three times, but "pragmatic" only once. Not conformant with the Go Advocacy Playbook.

Prediction: 5 years from now Go will be viewed with similar scorn to Java

nah. java is actually slowly moving towards being a modern language and a reasonable choice for a wide variety of tasks. go is going to inherit ruby's place

Java is so much better as a language and ecosystem than go. Java is getting better with each release slowly. My next favourite is Rust.

Don't know why other people's reason of choosing Go.

I don't actually like the Go itself, I use Go because the batteries it includes, and most of them are cross platform.

Sure, other language can do it with third-party lib management (npm, composer, crate etc), but then you have do deal with lib-associated problems (Log, error handling, bug, deprecation and license etc), and that is troubling.

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