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Comment by jxub | Hacker News Reader

The rebranding might make the language look sleeker and more enterprisey but it looks that they're rejecting their spirit of playfulness in order to appeal to the likes of Oracle clients and take away more Java mindshare.

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Go's language design is fundamentally about rigidity and consistency -- and I'm not saying that's bad -- but it's pretty far from playful.

I'd consider languages like JavaScript, Ruby, and Python to be playful languages by comparison.

If Python's considered playful, what does that make Perl?

Pernicious

Which Perl do you mean? Perl 5 or Perl 6?

Evil. Perl's just evil.

TBH I've always thought of Go as Google's Java. With some decisions to make developing at super-big-co even nicer, which helps you at google scale.

I've always thought of Go as Google's Java 1.4.

Not really, more like Java 1.1.

Java 1.4 already had much more features and library offerings than Go still lacks.

The Go standard library is top notch, especially for networking.

Might be, but it is a tiny portion of Java's standard library, including networking, even when comparing against Java 1.4, let alone 10.

I always thought of Go as Google's Erlang.

Erlang is so much more than just green threads. They're not at all comparable.

I think this gets too many downvotes. Yes, static vs dynamic typing. Yes, imperative vs functional language. On the other hand, CSP is conceptually fairly close to the Actor Model, so there are definitely similarities. I've written go code that looks similar to Erlang (a go routine receiving messages from an `interface{}` channel in a for loop and then dispatching based on the type.

Conceptually they are worlds apart. Supervision trees are even impossible in idiomatic Go.

Supervision trees have nothing to do with Actors or CSP. I can recommend reading the original papers.

Golang not well supporting supervision trees has more to do with the runtime not allowing to kill a goroutine. See http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2930

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