Hacker News Reader

Comment by innocentoldguy | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, but I’m super tired of “blah_blah_blah, written in Go” articles/titles (two so far today). If Go has some amazing feature, great! Let’s talk about it. If a program has some amazing feature, great! Let’s talk about that. All these “blah_blah_blah, written in Go” articles make it sound like Go is retarded in some way and that the ability to actually write programs in Go is somehow amazing. Is that really the case?

I don’t recall being inundated with “blah_blah_blah, written in C, C++, Swift, Rust, Erlang, C#, Java, Python, Ruby, Elixir, etc.” articles. Why do we have to constantly remind everyone that you can actually write programs in Go?

View on HN

In this case, this is a library for Go, not a standalone program, so it seems worthwhile to include the language in the description. If there's something technical about Go that makes pure-go implementations of things interesting it's that it's uncommon/frowned upon to use cgo to import c dependencies whereas in python/ruby/etc you can trivially wrap a C library for many things and call it a day.

Also, you mention you don't see similar posts for other languages, however, similar complaints are constantly lodged against Rust posts, maybe even more so than Go. A recent comment in one of those threads also mentioned similar musings were common against python earlier in its history.

Regardless, Go and Rust are popular languages on HN right now because they're new and interesting and being used to build interesting new software. In practice, other older languages are more popular for work, but as the library ecosystems improve, maybe that will change or maybe it won't.

> blah_blah_blah, written in [...] Rust

Those are too popular as well, e.g.:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18895655, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19583384, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19686972, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19064069, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19540845, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18903235, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19541741, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19883626, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19471471, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18696291, ...

Yeah I kind know what you mean, but this kind of expression (Very similar to Whataboutism) is how flame war started.

I recalled seeing a flagged comment by this account in another Go thread. Took a minute to find it:

> For me, the best way to optimize a Go program is to write it in Rust.

That, along with other anti-Go comments, explains things.

They explain that I dislike Go. I thought my comments on it made that clear. I think Go is a half-baked throw-back language that handles threading, errors, and dependencies poorly, and is restrictive and lacks features. If Google hadn’t invented it, I doubt it would have any sort of following at all.

You weren't paying attention.

Plus the written in C, Pascal, C++, Modula-2, Java... was taking place on BBS, USENET and written media, so hardly easy to find on HN.

So much this.

I remember how rabbid the python, perl and php fan boys all were back in the early days of their existence and how irritating they were to every one else.

I think its a sign of a language with a growing user base, and I suspect is that languages that don't generate this kind of fan base die off much earlier on.

I’m specifically talking about HN and the modern day. I found Perl fanboyism annoying as hell on Usenet back in the day.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com