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Comment by AndyKelley | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for the compliment.

I have some interesting news for you... Go is a smashing success, wildly popular, and eating Java's lunch. It is an objectively incorrect generalization to say that people dislike Go.

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Whoa, slow down there :) Go is certainly a success in absolute terms, making it to the top ten in some rankings, but at age 13 -- an age by which virtually all languages have either reached or neared their all-time peak with only a single exception I can think of -- it's only ~1/10th as popular as Java [1][2], and not eating nearly as much of its lunch as PHP or Ruby did back in the day.

[1]: https://www.devjobsscanner.com/blog/top-8-most-demanded-lang...

[2]: https://www.hiringlab.org/2019/11/19/todays-top-tech-skills/

Fair point! Thank you for adding nuance to the discussion.

What is the exception?

Certainly Haskell is an exception; it has a distinct bimodal distribution, if not more.

Lisp's popularity, when plotted, resembles a bunch of tipped-over parentheses.

Learning it right now.

I pretty sure that would be python

1/10th as popular as one of the by-far most popular programming languages of all time is still a huge success story.

Agreed, go has kept me liking programming because, for me, it most the most reliable tool for making trustworthy software. All langs have tradeoffs and areas they excel in but go brings me the most joy/motivation.

Its nice to see a language with similar philsophies tackle the space where go isn't as good at: when you don't want a GC and you need to interface with C. For many that is Rust and I respect it, but I think Rust values concurrency "safety" too high and makes too many compromises in language design to achieve it. Memory safety is a BIG deal to me, without it, sufficiently complex software has never ending CVE's but concurrency bugs just doesn't cause anywhere close to the same number of security problems (orders of magnitude) and crashing programs is fine in most applications and I find concurrency bugs usually are easy to fix early in application lifecycle.

Rust only protects against data races, not general concurrency bugs.

Stroustrup's law applies here: there are two types of languages: languages people complain about and languages nobody uses.

> It is an objectively incorrect generalization to say that people dislike Go

It is not, people USE go, they do not like go really.

Really? I like Go, I might even love it.

I like Go

This is true, I don't really like Go. After years of writing code in Assembly, C, C++, Perl, Basic, C#, Java, Python, Rust, JavaScript, TypeScript, Lua, Zig, and Go I find that what I really like is good tooling, and code that is easy to read and reason about. Go the language and toolset happen to do this really rather well at the moment though.

Nonsense. I love it and I've been programming since the 80's.

I watched (and used) C++ as it grew into the monstrosity it is today. I've written and maintained production code in F#, C#, Python, Ruby, Perl, Java, JavaScript, Go, PHP, Lua, VBScript, Visual Basic, C, and C++ and every variant of shell scripting imaginable.

I've spent time working with Erlang, Haskell, Rust and a variety of other exotic languages because I found it interesting. I created a port of Clojure's Transducers to C# because I could.

I am not afraid of abstractions, functional programming, or complicated CompSci concepts. And yet I keep going back to Go.

I like Go as a language in the abstract sense, but the experience of writing Go code is so tedious to me. Refusing to compile if there's an unused variable or unused import is too harsh - at least give me the option to make these things warnings.

Having unused variables or unused imports makes the code dirty and should be treated as errors. It's one of the (few) good things about Go.

In production code? Absolutely. While you experiment, write throw-away code, debug? Hell no!

Sure, but it’s a lot of extra friction when iterating/debugging.

My usual approach is to comment stuff out while debugging/developing. Works well.

PL arguments are like:

"I like icecream."

"You idiot! I hate icecream and think everyone who likes icecream is a raging moron who deserves having their teeth rot out of their head! I wish their teeth would rot out tomorrow because I am so sick of waiting for it!"

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