But Go is one in a long line of proprietary languages that those of us who have been around the block know to stay away from. Recently: Java was Sun's, C# is Microsoft's, Swift is Apple's, Go is Google's. With any luck, all will be footnotes in ten years. Those of us who knew better than to get invested in them will be fine. Everyone else gets a chance to learn something.
I think also it's inaccurate to call any of these languages proprietary. They are all open source and if you wish you can fork them and make your own. C# in particular is now run by the dotnet foundation which is nonprofit with elected board seats, putting it in a better place for governance than many community driven languages.
Ios development is a walled garden. C# is barely used except to target Windos. Go? Too early to say. If it did fade away, who would miss it, really? Its express design purpose was to be not powerful enough to make big mistakes in. Has it transcended that? If so, what is its purpose now?
Java has shown staying power, despite its shortcomings, although its connection to the Apache Foundation ("where projects go to die") offers just a ray of hope.
The Unity game engine use C# for scripting; I wouldn't call that "barely used".
Anything less than ten billion lines counts as "little used".
How big is Unity?
Also Xamarin which if I read this [2] correctly owns a third of the mobile app market. I don't know whether that's credible but apps are a huge market.
It is possibly that could get you the 10 bn. It is quite certain that there has been more than 10 bn lines written on.NET Framework, probably far more, as for 15+ years it has been the dominant language for corporate apps built on the Microsoft stack.
On top of that.NET Core is growing much faster over time,according to their blogs, and it's cross platform as you know.
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2018/09/05/unity...
[2] https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/madp/xamarin-market-sh...
Java and C# are not going anywhere, especially now that .NET works on OSX and Linux. Swift, unlikely. Go, still uncertain.
It's fairly short-sighted to criticize a language and hope it dies out in usage just because a corporation is chiefly responsible for it.
I won't put survival rating for it to be very big. I'm sure Apple would keep it for decades to come, but I'm wouldn't bet on it being anywhere near as popular as it is now in the future.
Swift is actually a very pleasant language, and apple provides some pretty good documentation although it could be better.
It's going to play out like this: Swift or Objective-C (for legacy codebases/people who already experts in objective-c and don't want to switch), and some other, slower languages that will always be second class.
That would mean its fate would be tied to iOS, which is used only on phones built by a single company. When that company stopped producing mobile phones, or decided to use a different operating system, the language would die.
I would be inclined to say no, it's rather unlikely, short of apple somehow suddenly going bankrupt.
TensorFlow also has a Swift API in development [3]. The people at FastAI seem quite excited about it [4].
[1] https://developer.ibm.com/swift/
[2] https://github.com/IBM-Swift/Kitura
A lot of the tools in the modern ops ecosystem are written in Go, and that trend is not slowing down. Not even going to start to list them. A lot of devs also love Go and it has a very nice community. If you would have said this 5 years ago? Sure - but now it's past the 10y mark in age - I think it's safe to say Go isn't going to go away any time soon.
Java isn't dying for a while either - anyone who still needs to support applets aside, or corporate applications written when Java was the fashionable thing to ship apps in, Android's install base will mean it's relevant for a fair stretch yet, even if OpenJDK fell into the sun tomorrow.
Swift I don't have much insight into, as I haven't done much with OSX or iOS in a while, and I have indeed not seen much uptake outside of those.
Which languages are you suggesting were/are good targets?
Python is technically not one company driving it but a bunch of developers on it are employed by large companies to work on it.
JavaScript is seeing a bunch of use in a great many places, but originated with one company's implementation and development.
Rust is pretty obviously one company's child, even though it is seeing decent uptake from other users. No predictions on whether it would survive said company dropping their work on it, though.
Having said that, just because it exists in Julia does not mean it can exist in Go. I just wanted to mention that there are exceptions to the rule which begs the question if it is a rule in the first place.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8733705
Go is the language that taught me to really appreciate writing things in Java.
What? Python's peak (2.7) has come and gone.
Java is also used by Facebook, Microsoft, Salesforce, Apple, and many other companies that aren't necessarily known for their Java development.
Java usually is the base for every core banking system that's not old enough to have been written in COBOL (and even those are being migrated to Java in many cases) or hasn't been written from scratch in .NET.
The same Java is also used by governments throughout the world.
If Oracle vanishes completely tomorrow, there's huge incentives for a community initiative to completely take it over ASAP. There's probably tens of billions of dollars in existing code bases that have to be maintained and extended.
More than that, Java's already 23 years old. It's not a new language. Plus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
So not just all the big corporates but plenty of tech companies like Facebook, Uber, Spotify, Twitter, Linkedin, Netflix, Apple, Google etc all rely heavily on it.
Maybe they do now, in this decadent era of Lite beer, hand calculators and "user-friendly" software but back in the Good Old Days, when the term "software" sounded funny and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes, Real Programmers wrote in machine code. Not Fortran. Not RATFOR. Not, even, assembly language. Machine Code. Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers. Directly.
(It's a joke...)
I know I get a little absurd towards the end but no more so than your remarks about Java.
Now they are driven by ISO Standards bodies, with many, many participants -- ATT not among them anymore, to my knowledge. Even in 1995 ATT had nothing approaching veto power.
My remarks lumping Java in with C# and Swift are transparent wishful thinking.
If you have a contractual obligation that requires to exactly use a specific version of C/C++, then you'll need to pay money for the actual specification. In pretty much any other situation, the drafts are sufficient and perhaps even better (because they will have incorporated some errata).
I'm sure you were perfectly aware of it, but C and C++ working drafts are almost identical (I think? Never bought an ISO version), and available for free from open-std.org. For example, http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/standards
I’m not saying it was all terrible nor that Go is managed better. But whenever there is a conversation about Go on HN people get so caught up in their own snobbery about how terrible they perceive Go to be that they lose all touch with reality.
The fact remains a language backed by a company is far less likely to die into insignificance than a language that isn’t. This is because it takes a lot for a language to gain momentum. You have a bit of a chicken and egg problem where developers won’t use a language without a good ecosystem, frameworks and community. But people aren’t going to write that if there aren’t already developers using it. This is where corporate sponsorship really helps.
Thankfully there are a plethora of good languages out there you can choose from. If you don’t like the direction of one language then you can use another. Or, alternatively, since Java, C# and Go all have open source compilers, you could fork and build your own community.