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Comment by _6pvr | Hacker News Reader

I really hate the wave of language "competition" and contention. Go is a language that allows lots of developers to get great work done. So is Node.js, so is Haskell, so is Rust, so is Java. The list goes on.

If you find a thing you like, you should use it! If you find a thing you don't like, just don't use it! Find the language that lets you express your intention as easily and correctly as possible and run with it. For some people that is Go, for some people that is Erlang.

I'm certain this thread will devolve into "Go isn't a great programming language because..." type posts, but I really think those posts are kind of ill-intended. The author of this post likes Go, which they're allowed to do, and they should continue using and enjoying it.

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I'd love for languages to be win/win scenarios, but it does seem they are a bit of a zero sum game. The team you're on will need to pick a language, if it's not the language you prefer you lose, so it's natural to want to influence others.

If you prefer Go, and are on a Java team, you'll want to convince others that Go is far superior, and vice versa.

> If you prefer Go, and are on a Java team, you'll want to convince others that Go is far superior, and vice versa.

If you prefer Go, and are on a Java team, does arguing with people that are unrelated to your work on the internet change your working environment?

Indeed lists 30k Java jobs and 2k golang jobs. OP has a vested interest in marketing their preferred language to increase the availability of jobs for that preferred language.

You kinda skipped the relevant part of my question.

Does arguing on the internet with Java fans increase Go's usage at hypothetical person's work?

If more people in the industry appreciate concise and powerful languages that reward deep expertise, I am more likely to find paid work where I can be happy and productive in the future. I started in C, and it’s pretty alarming to see an impoverished language gaining market share after years of progress; that’s why I argue the bar should be getting higher for new languages in production.

Indeed. Ironically, the only reason we're in a thread talking about Go is years of "Go is so much simpler than language X" propaganda, without which it would have never gained such a hold in the industry zeitgeist.

I can't help but think that if we all had that mindset, we'd still be programming in assembly. People who don't care enough to criticize the status quo don't put forth the effort needed to change it.

There is a subtle difference between objective constructive discourse and pseudo-religious language fanboyism. The latter happens far more commonly than the former. In fact many who do the latter even believe they're conducting the former when in fact they're misinterpreting their own personal preference as objective fact.

To example this point: the fact that people do still sometimes need write some code in assembly really should demonstrate that your point would be better framed as "different languages serve different use cases so it's pointless convincing everyone to conform to a single language" -- which is precisely the point the OP was also making.

I don't agree. My argument is not that developers shouldn't have opinions, or that developers shouldn't try to improve languages (in the ways any individual developer thinks any individual language should be improved). My gripe is more with those that feel it worthwhile to complain publicly about a language to those that enjoy it. There are more than enough languages to go around - if you're a person that dislikes the Go programming language, rather than trying to make Go enthusiasts agree with you, just go do something else (find a language that you actually do enjoy and build things with it).

> People who don't care enough to criticize the status quo don't put forth the effort needed to change it

Nowhere in my post did I suggest people should not criticize the status quo.

I've been seeing this too all over the place. Why do we have to continue break out in this tribal behavior with our identities tied to what language we use. It matters less what language you use than what kind of algorithms and data structures you know, not to mention problem solving skills. And those things can translate to any language.

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