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Comment by throwaway894345 | Hacker News Reader

Counterpoint: There are lots of engineers who are pretty excited about Go. Go ranked #5 in the 2020 StackOverflow Survey's "Most Loved Languages" section, for example, and I've never even heard of an account in which the manager lobbied to use Go for a project--it's almost always bottom up. Seems like it's not just managers who appreciate being able to come into a project and quickly come up to speed and contribute. It's strange to me that you portray that property so negatively.

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It was also the #21 (37% of respondents) most dreaded. For context, the “love” rating was a 62% response, so that means it’s something like a 2:1 love to dread ratio. At my current company it’s definitely leadership pushing for Go and not the other way around, and lots of startups have chosen Go early and are stuck to it inflexibly.

Edit: I retract this. Looks like the metrics are simply inverses (even though they shouldn’t be).

This is deeply silly (so is that "dreaded" metric). Go is here less dreaded than Julia and Swift, two enthusiast-driven languages, as well as Ruby, and is just 2 slots up from Python.

You gave away the game when you pointed out it was the "#21 most dreaded". What is anyone supposed to do with that very specific number?

The whole survey is fuzzy data of course, it could even be the same people dreading a language as loving it. That’s why I provided the percentage respondents. Citing either one as the value of a language is of course dubious, but if we’re acknowledging one metric we may as well acknowledge the other.

> it could even be the same people dreading a language as loving it

Are they not literally inverses of each other? It's two ways of stating the same number, not something you can take as two data points.

The survey doesn’t say how the data was collected, but there has to at least be a middle “neutral” option because the two numbers don’t always add to 100%. Semantically they are opposites, but so are love and hate, and we know that a person can love and hate another person at the same time, or so the songs tell us.

They do always add up to 100%.

I think you’re right, it was confusing because sometimes it was only to 99% but that’s probably rounding. Disappointing and a poor survey methodology or at least poor presentation. There are definitely some languages I both love and dread, like Java and it would be nice to see those as separate metrics.

It would be one thing if Go was one of the top 5 most loved and one of the top 5 most dreaded languages. That would suggest (imperfectly, but meaningfully) that it was a polarizing language. But it's the #21st most dreaded language; it is less dreaded than Julia, which is a pure enthusiast language. Your data point actually doesn't show anything.

I think you'd be on rhetorically surer footing just arguing that these surveys don't mean anything.

The fact of the matter is that while Go certainly has a squadron of haters on message boards (it made several design decisions that were almost precision-targeted to alienate PL connoisseurs), huge numbers of working programmers really like Go. It's silly to argue that isn't true.

It is looking like I was wrong about the dreaded metric and that it’s actually just an inverse. If so, I have a strong disagreement with the way this data was collected. That said, what matters is the actual qualities of a language rather than how popular it is.

Geez, just take the L.

Like I said previously, citing any of these values to prove a point is dubious. That said I have retracted my top level comment and admitted that my analysis is wrong. What more do you want?

Props for admitting your error, but falling back to “there must be a problem with the way the data was collected (because it contradicts my priors)” isn’t particularly admirable.

It's pretty ridiculous that in order to be in the clear I would have to agree with the way the survey was conducted and presented when it obviously causes confusion, but okay.

No one suggested you have to agree with the survey’s methodology. It’s one thing to identify specific problems with the survey and quite another thing to cite the survey yourself, then when your argument is rebutted, to argue that there must be something methodologically wrong with the survey.

The survey isn’t wrong because it says something I don’t want it to, it’s wrong because it says something other than what it reads as. Elsewhere I said it was either the methodology or the presentation. If they had measured dread and it said something other than I wanted it to, fine. If they hadn’t measured dread but hadn’t presented it as if they had, also fine. But as it is, the survey is misleading because it shows dread as though it was an actual quantity and it’s not. For instance we know that in psychology, you can’t measure unhappiness, invert the numbers, and call it happiness, because happiness and unhappiness are not mutually exclusive.

You would really put Swift over rust as an enthusiast-driven language??

No, I didn't mention Rust at all. Resist the impulse to reduce everything to zero-sum competitions between languages.

> lots of startups have chosen Go early and are stuck to it inflexibly.

Is the implication here that it's a common experience among startups to pick Go and regret the decision? Can you give any evidence to support this (e.g., a survey of startups that chose Go and whether or not they regret their decision)?

Or perhaps the implication is that Go is uniquely difficult to migrate away from? I have a hard time believing that--it's expensive to change languages across the board except for a handful of special cases that were designed for interop from the start (e.g., Java and Kotlin, C and C++, etc)--I don't see anything that makes Go uniquely difficult to migrate away from.

There’s no implication intended, it’s just related information that I have which could spark a discussion. (I obtained it through speaking to a lot of companies I’ve been interviewing with in the past weeks.) I’m sure Go is possible to migrate from, it’s just that companies that have it are decided on it and not interested in alternatives.

> It was also the #21 (37% of respondents) most dreaded.

This could trick someone who doesn't know that there are 25 languages in that survey and that the most dreaded chart is just an inverse of the most loved chart. You could also say that Typescript is the #24 most dreaded language (32.9% of respondents)... it's also the second most loved language. Rust is the #25 most dreaded language (because there are 25 languages on that list).

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-mo...

Rust is an 86% to 14% ratio (6:1 love to dread) which would for example mean it’s less controversial. Not that I put any stake into these numbers.

It's important to note that Rust is not used nearly as much commercially which means that most of the people who use it are enthusiasts who like the language. So when you have a metric like

> % of developers who are developing with the language or technology and have expressed interest in continuing to develop with it

you then get a very strong selection effect which is the main reason why Rust has been at the top of that survey for a number of years now.

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