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Comment by void_mint | Hacker News Reader

> My intention wasn't to trash-talk, and I admitted my bias up front.

I apologize if my statement came off aggressive - I wasn't necessarily trying to say that you're shit talking specifically, just that it seems like lots of/most programming language discussions on HN devolve into some form of "Rust Good Go Bad" or "Go Good Rust Bad", which I think is usually just inflammatory.

Your prediction is 100% bias-based. There are equal (probably more) developers that would say the same thing you said, but with Go being the language that sticks and Rust being the language that's hated. The bias is the entire answer. An unbiased answer is "Who knows" and "Probably both will be loved and hated".

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> Your prediction is 100% bias-based. There are equal (probably more) developers that would say the same thing you said, but with Go being the language that sticks and Rust being the language that's hated.

It actually sounds like your answer is more bias-based, because your intuition is more wrong here. There is data from the 2020 Stack Overflow survey[0] indicating a significant lead for devs who use Rust and continue to want to develop in it, vs. Go. 86.1% Rust vs. 62.3% Go.

[0]https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#most-popular-...

In the context of the article, I think that can be attributed to age (go is older than rust, so trending towards the "brown field." See for example Scala, which is a little bit older, and ended up in both loved and hated lists. I'd speculate that Go will be in the same camp in 4 years or so based on polarized sentiment I've observed.

That being said, there may be something about strict/complicated languages like scala and haskell that tends to polarize developer sentiment. Rust seems like it could fall into that same pattern based on the "up front" work that it demands.

> It actually sounds like your answer is more bias-based, because your intuition is more wrong here. There is data from the 2020 Stack Overflow survey[0] indicating a significant lead for devs who use Rust and continue to want to develop in it, vs. Go. 86.1% Rust vs. 62.3% Go.

That's great to hear. Unfortunately, language popularity in enterprise/production environments isn't really based around how much a developer loves or hates something.

There are more Go programs/programmers now than Rust, was the basis of my post that you're objecting to, which can be verified if you scroll up on the link you posted.

Those numbers aren’t comparable.

Go and Rust don’t have similar numbers of developers. My intuition is that Go has an order of magnitude more. It’s like comparing product reviews on a shopping website - 4.7 based on 20 reviews vs 4.3 based based on 200 reviews. It’s hard to say which is better. You’d have to go deeper into each of those reviews to learn if the pros and cons apply to your use case.

Another important metric, as OP pointed out, is the age of the code base these devs are working on. Rust devs are probably working on code bases they started and Go devs are maintaining someone else’s code base.

That said, I agree with the current top comment on the thread - Rust code based may prove easier to maintain when we look back 10 years from now.

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