Interesting how developer views can differ.
Someone describes Go as "unacceptably crippled" while Uber engineering has 1500 microservices written in Go, making it their primary language.
Someone describes Go as "unacceptably crippled" while Uber engineering has 1500 microservices written in Go, making it their primary language.
Go was explicitly designed to be a poor language of this sort, as evidenced by the infamous Rob Pike quote:
> The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt.
In other words: a language that makes programmers fungible. And how did they accomplish this? By omitting features and barely going for the lowest-common denominator of the languages listed, disregarding any reasons other languages may have for their more ‘advanced’ features like generics. Hence, crippled.
(Frankly, I object more to describing Scala as ‘the most complex edifice’.)
Uber on the other hand has many languages available yet picked Go. So they certainly don't think it is "unacceptably crippled".
Even the most charitable interpretation would conclude it's speaking in broad terms and not just "for my use case".
Full paragraph:
> The beauty of programming language design is not building the most complex edifice like Scala or making the language unacceptably crippled like Go - but giving the programmer the ability to represent complex ideas elegantly and safely. Rust really shines in that regard.
Switching to Go was an educated decision. Not a continuation of what was there.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-technology-stack-behind-Ub...
I also find Go-the-language unacceptably crippled. Unfortunately, Go-the-runtime is the only best runtime for microservice-based applications, if you want a GC, especially if you want to run the system on limited hardware.
All the other options are either too bloated to comfortably spawn in large numbers (Java, C#, Node, Python, Ruby take too long to start, use too much RAM , and/or give you too large containers), or are too new and unproven (Nim).
So, we chose to use the inferior language and line with a small hit to productivity (language choice has little impact on productivity after the learning stage anyway) for the superior runtime system.