I was very surprised to see that your article about golang got flagged here on HN. Never realized that go was such a sensitive topic.
I assume this is related? Can anyone in the golang community give some context?
I was hoping for the discussion here to be around similar experiences, how DDoS really has become a commodity, how other folks's websites is architected, how various platforms fare against these threats (and what it costs), whether folks were are of Cloudflare's default caching policies, or its DDoS protection.
Anything BUT rehashing the discussions of the past few days: everybody is over that. If you do want to discuss those, you can move that conversation to my subreddit, or my twitter, or heck, send me an e-mail.
(Also, and I've stated this elsewhere many times: the Go community doesn't have to answer for that. This is one individual having well-timed fun, let's please PLEASE leave it at that)
Your productivity in any language is directly proportional to your time and effort investment in it. It's in your best interests to pick the language that's likely to thrive and spend time learning it's ins and outs. On the flip side, betting on a horse that doesn't win could mean the loss of months or years of effort. This is why people evangelize the platforms they're invested in - convincing other people to join improves the health of the platform, increasing their return on investment.
This evangelizing can sometimes become contentious if others perceive it as an attack on their platform. People defend their language mostly because they don't want to see it lose popularity. If it did, their language's viability is threatened and their investment is in jeopardy. It's also partly because they've spent so long on it that it's become a part of their identity.
A person who thinks of themselves as a “Go developer” rather than a “developer” is going to take that article personally.
E.g.: the "east vs west" fight in Ukraine is a great example. One side is invested in the democratic/capitalistic model, the other in the autocratic/central-planning model. The war isn't just over a patch of land on the border of Europe.
If people are willing to start a shooting war with actual blood, violence, and death over a mere "ideology", then it shouldn't come as a surprise that developers are willing to go to a "war of words" over their favourite language or platform.
As an aside, I very much enjoyed "A half hour to learn Rust" from fasterthanli.me as it got me to actually start writing simple stuff in the language so I'm a little biased in favour of the author, but the critique didn't seem to be particularly harsh. As someone who's primarily a Java dev I'm used to seeing much more biting (and often inaccurate) condemnation of my own preferred tool!
[1] https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-half-hour-to-learn-rust
The dots that I didn't connect was that the post was a reply to the response on HN and since the post was controversial, it (being a HN comment, in a sense) should have been "more thoughtful and substantive, not less".
Perhaps the headline was the worst part of the article? Like you say - "Lies we tell ourselves to keep using [X]" could have just been "Common reasons to use [X], and why I disagree with them".
Thanks for pointing it out!
If this topic gets flagged then we’ll know if it was go specific I suppose.
EDIT: Why am I flagged?
We all have our own particular axes to grind but even me, someone who is language agnostic, is getting tired of the tone of those submissions.
The problem is that he’s writing interesting, informed commentary on topics that are hot button issues for people who are a tad over-sensitive about their career choices :)
You can be a happy Go programmer, whilst also recognising that the language has limitations & things it’s really not good at. That would be the mature, honest response to these articles. What is not a mature, honest reponse is DDOSing the guy because you (the generic you, not you specifically hnlmorg!) don’t like his opinions.
The problem is the author preemptively shrugged off those responses by ostensibly accusing those coders of having Stockholm Syndrome.
It was content like that which caused the issues. Regardless of whether it’s eloquent trolling or just a genuine but passionate piece, it was touching on an already hot topic with poor consideration about how it would be received.
And that’s fine for a personal blog. But when you then see your articles explode online and then proceed to write follow up pieces in the same tone and intended for the same audience (regardless of whether he directly submitted it to HN), it’s harder to dismiss as someone not trying to exploit flame wars to booster their own blogs traffic.
I guess they succeeded in that too; albeit a DDoS attack wasn’t quite what they intended.
To be clear, I don’t agree with the DDoS attack. Nor do I believe they deserved it (what they actually deserved was just for the articles to get flagged and forgotten) but I can still blame the author for the arguments on here when they saw the existing discourse and decided to write follow up pieces of equally antagonistic tones.
> I can still blame the author for the arguments on here when they saw the existing discourse and decided to write follow up pieces of equally antagonistic tones.
seems very victim blaming to me.
Amos’ articles are opinionated, well written & amusing rants. If a bunch of immature Go programmers can’t take a spot of criticism directed at their favourite language then that says a lot more about them than it does about anyone else.
Given HN is the victim in that context, that would mean my statement is the literal opposite of victim blaming.
Funny because he works for fly.io which explain all the Rust thing but doesn't fly.io use a lot of Go as well indirectly?
https://fasterthanli.me/articles/lies-we-tell-ourselves-to-k...
"It may well be that Go is not adequate for production services unless your shop is literally made up of Go experts (Tailscale) or you have infinite money to spend on engineering costs (Google)."
You should tell that to the thousand of compagnies running Go just fine in production.
Reading what dang wrote makes it seem really sensible.
Links to dang's comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31228950
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31227642
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31227584
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31117569
The downweighting is intended for when overly generic or offtopic subthreads are stuck at the top of a page, choking out more interesting or on-topic conversation.
(Unfortunately it caused some trouble a while back because one such downweighted subthread was critical of a YC startup, and a much more important rule is that we moderate HN less when YC or YC startups are the topic. But it was a straightforward mistake—the user who marked the thread generic just didn't realize that the topic was YC related.)
Since it's an experiment, we want to keep an eye on it. Currently I have the software send an email each time a downweight is applied, so we can review them as part of going through the regular HN inbox. When I saw this one, it was such a perfect example that I came to the thread and auto-collapsed it as well. So that's its current status: downweighted and auto-collapsed.
Btw, basically none of these situations get created intentionally. They're a tragedy-of-the-commons thing where each person does what they do innocently but it all adds up to something suboptimal. That's pretty much what moderation exists for: to jiggle the system when it gets stuck in one of its failure modes.