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Comment by josephcsible | Hacker News Reader

Go is only successful because Google spent so much money propping it up by paying people to write stuff in it. It has so many major flaws that it would have had no chance of taking off otherwise. If Google had spent the same amount of money on Haskell instead, it'd be even more popular than Go is today.

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Go is very simple, provides decent static type safety, has a nice concurrency model, and compiles to fast static binaries across all major platforms. People choose it all the time because it’s a great choice. A wild number of popular open source tools are written in go, very few of them created by google. As someone who wrote go for many years I think you’re overstating how limiting it’s “major flaws” are. And fwiw go ranks much higher than haskell on stack overflow’s annual developer survey.

Everything you just said either applies equally to Haskell, or is a cultural factor mostly explained by what the parent comment wrote.

Haskell probably has a much better concurrency model too with STM being quite awesome

This a pretty hot take. I'm in the early stages of learning go. So far I like it a lot, but I come from the perspective of a data person who only knows python. I want to learn a compiled language, what would you suggest instead?

Rust.

Haskell, Idris or Rust! I share the largely negative opinion of Go.

(my background is mostly python, R, javascript, clojure)

I'm kind of with you about Google being heavily responsible to the level of which Go became an success, but that has been the case (backed by large companies) for many popular programming languages such as C, C++, Java, Rust, etc... It helps, but not every corporate backed language is successful or makes it to the top 20.

I don't completely buy the argument that a Google backed Haskell would have been as popular as Go. Readability (which is subjective), familiarity (often C is the reference), and the ease of which the language can be learned are still major factors in widespread acceptance.

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