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Comment by o_1 | Hacker News Reader

Go is a tool. I haven't seen a language get as much directed criticism on HN in a long time. I appreciate genuine feedback, but only when its useful and direct. I can't remember a time when Java got ripped on HN this hard. Distancing oneself away from the religion of languages is the best thing I've done thus far. I "hope" the merits of language justify direction of software rather than the hype.

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Java is like 15 years older than Go. Go had the opportunity to learn from Java. And in some ways it’s better, fast compile times, simple to deploy binaries, etc.

But the language itself was a step backward from Java in some ways, and only recently has gained some of those features.

I don’t think it’s wrong to say that Go in its desire to be simple left a lot to be desired for many people.

There is a better Java, its Kotlin and its embrace has been lukewarm by community. I think golang serves an interesting purpose and it was always meant to be a better C not better Java.

I’ve always seen Go as far more like Java than C. They facilitate the use cases. Go isn’t a good C replacement for mostly the same reasons Java is not.

People are adopting Kotlin, I’ve seen many coworkers using it for new projects. It becomes a bit more complex if you’re trying to integrate it into an existing large code base, of which there are many in Java.

Go is being used for system programming, that's not what Java is for

You should go read about embedded Java: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embedded_Java or define what you mean by system programming.

nobody significant uses it in linux and cloud space nowadays

don't give me the crap that java is for system programming just because java can, it doesn't mean anything if nobody significant is using it

any programming language can system programming as well if you go by that definition, python, lua, javascript

Depends on which community. It was extremely welcomed by the Android community.

Actually it was been heavily pushed by Android team, which knowingly stagnate Android Java, with the agenda to replace its use outside the Android system libraries.

Even Android 13 update to a newer Java 11 LTS subset seems to be caused by not losing the ability to use specific Java libraries than anything else.

A weird special-pleading argument, as Java is intensively used in our industry, including for new projects, and language features are engineering decisions, not moral lessons.

Of course, people have to come up with special pleading arguments about Go, because most of the complaints (and all the most pointed complaints) are shared by the other most popular languages in industry. You can't get any traction with a takedown of Python, only with Go or Rust. So these kinds of complaints are invariably pretzled up into some form of "Go is a terrible language for the good language it is compared to most other languages; it may be better in many ways than its predecessors, but it had no business not being even more better". Well, peachy.

Don't have a programming language as part of your identity. It takes you weird places.

I’m not sure what’s more predictable: the go-hater-is-my-identity posters or the defensive go-coder-is-my-identity posters responding to the OP line by line. (Or perhaps the smug above-it-all posters such as myself).

As a likely certifiable go fanboy, I like the article and see a lot of stuff I agree with. Still enjoy programming in Go. Will error handling ever be less verbose and repetitive? Not sure. If not, it’s not a dealbreaker for me. And I do acknowledge that the fact that all the error handling is right there in my face makes it easy to reason about. Pros and cons, folks.

I thought this article was a cut above a lot of the Go criticism I've read. Language critiques are good! Where we tend to get in trouble is language ordering.

I agree, it was well supported rather than just one big bitch-fest.

The irony is that from point of view from Go folks, Java's type system is already PhD skill level.

I don't know who language like this is supposed to convince.

Convince who? Go folks?

That is a lost battle, like fighting windmills.

Hey, can you please rein back this sort of post on HN? I totally get, and appreciate, your passion (and deep knowledge) of programming language spaces–I've observed it for years and have learned quite a bit from your posts. But it's really important to restrain the passion from crossing into destructive places like this. Otherwise we just end up with angry flamewars where no one is learning anything from anybody. The whole idea on HN is to try to avoid those end-states and stay in more interesting places.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you're not here for discussion, why are you here?

Maybe you can spend the rest of the evening asking the same to everyone else that shares the same opinion as myself on this thread.

I don't know who language like this is supposed to convince. Apparently: people who already agree with you?

I am not going to convince anyone, I am not a missionary doing conversions, specially from a group that workships statements like,

"The key point here is that 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 be able to use them to build good software. And so the language we give them needs to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt."

You're definitely not going to convince anyone if the only thing you can inject into a discussion is contempt. The "Smug Lisp Weenies" tried that course; we're not all using Lisp. In fact: their heyday was the great flourishing of the least-Lisp-like languages.

Did you even read the article. Also, it was written by an individual and their experience with the language. The article merits a read or at least a skim.

I cannot speak for others, but I do not see a cabal of people conspiring to bring down Golang on HN. Yes, esoteric languages get love and practical languages like C++/Go/Java et al. get hate because people are more familiar with them and see their warts.

The more a language is criticized the more often it is used.

It appears that many of the issues I see in articles of this type are often RTFM-level issues, especially when calling out linter exceptions (which a quick scan of the source code of an individual linter would help to explain).

Do we have an example of a language getting better with critism? I love the evolution of JavaScript but not sure if blogs shaped it.

Some people still call it a toy language because they are mentally like 15 years behind and think it's unreadable nested Jquery event emitter callbacks and Object.prototype overloading. The rest of us pushed for / picked up on the rapid improvements in tooling, spec, and best practices, causing "JavaScript fatigue", though that has slowed.

It's pretty simple, people don't understand why their favorite language is not as popular as Go eventhough they think it's vastly superior.

Java has gotten a ton of hate since it’s inception. Now it’s so embedded that no one really cares anymore.

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