Why does Go get so much hate here? Almost all front page articles are about how Go suCkS mAn
I know Go isnt great or perfect, but still, why so much hate? I seriously want to know
I know Go isnt great or perfect, but still, why so much hate? I seriously want to know
But also, I don't think it's specifically hate, it's more of a reaction to the overwhelming wave of posts here (and basically on every programming forum) from around 2014 to 2018.
Go was so hyped it was unavoidable that if you were starting a project, dozens of comments would be shouting at you to use go.
Some posts are people finally getting to say, "I told you so, but I was against the crowd a few years ago" Some posts are people saying, "Go doesn't really fit this use case" Some posts are people just academically sharing the language features you don't get when you choose go.
Basically, in my opinion (and as a developer of a large go codebase that I really love), thousands of people hyped up go as a silver bullet or a "near-perfect" language. This is obviously not true, go has many downsides. When you tried to bring them up before, you were downvoted and pushed aside for the hype. Now that people are maintaining legacy go code, there's more appetite for these conversations about go's tradeoffs.
I especially find it funny that people assume that people like Rob Pike and Ken Thompson who have published research papers on computer science forgot or misunderstand modern language features. They purposely made their language this way, for better or for worse. They never stated that they were trying to make the next Java. And all of the successful projects that have been released so far written in Go is proof enough that it seems they know what they're doing.
People complain online for a language they won't use instead of using the languages that are "superior" to make useful modern software.
Now there's a lot of Go code in the wild, projects people want to use or extend and programmers who will choose it by default, and it's starting to displace C#, Java, and C++ where the comparisons become a lot more preferential and vague. Do you want a faster GC or deterministic allocation? Nominal or structural interfaces? People fear change, especially in a field where change is only loosely correlated with improvement.
I think Go is quietly taking over some business domain applications, reminiscent of Python ca. 2003 a lot of companies I see are using it for a few key components that benefit heavily from memory savings of value types and/or easier naive concurrency, but they're relatively quiet about it. There's also a small but significant cohort of junior devs today who learned to program by making games on fantasy consoles or homebrew hardware projects, want to keep working with those data-oriented patterns they learned C and C++, and Go supports that style a lot more idiomatically than Java. As much as I sometimes rant about "kids today", more of the current generation know the true value of a MB or a ms better than that of 10 years ago (Rust is helping a lot here, too).