What's with all the Go hate on HN all of a sudden?
Something so apparently mundane and poorly thought getting traction is a regression in the world of software engineering, supported by a Big Evil Corp that many folks dislike.
I've also personally seen a social meta-effect of this, where in a particular space all of the language aficionados would make a point of dumping on Go whenever Go was discussed (or even when a dig at Go could be shoe-horned into another discussion), and at a certain point there are only negative discussions of it, and the snobbery (justified or not) is a form of social bonding.
Of course, there are loads of legitimate criticism to be applied to the language design, the runtime, the rollout, the marketing, the framings of the authors, but there's a persistence, a snarl, to some of the critics that seems to me to go beyond an observation of the real issues. For reasons listed above, some people seem to take hating Go quite personally.
Go is good enough. It has some short-comings. I'd like to see non-nullable types, even though I haven't had a memfault in ages. But it's easy to write it, runs fast, is memory efficient, and runs practically everywhere without a fuss. For normal software, that's such a big plus. I'd hate to have to go back to Java.
Why should I throw it away and buy a new set which will give me the same thing?
The choice is yours, novelty or not.
And the final point, why reinvent the wheel each time? Go recreates a bunch of tooling, ecosystem that already existed.
Go, philosophically, is a terrible language to show off in. It’s intentionally designed for every line to require as little brainpower to understand as possible. It’s not an aspirational language - unless you aspire to be able to hire lots of junior programmers and make sure they don’t cause too much trouble.
The lukewarm support go had here was because it was still new and trendy. Rust will lose its lustre in a decade or so too, and the tone will inevitably turn more negative. You can see the pattern slowly play itself out at the moment with docker.
> The lukewarm support go had here was because it was still new and trendy. Rust will lose its lustre in a decade or so too, and the tone will inevitably turn more negative....
Are Rust and Go not the same age?
Rust only really started to get traction after 1.0 landed in 2015. Even then, writing web services and things like that in rust has only really been ergonomic in the last few years as async/await has stabilized. Rust is still a pretty niche language, and its much easier to admire something from a distance.
Go hit 1.0 in 2012, but people started using it in production before even then.
Also why it's a bit silly to compare Rust to any other language (just pick your favorite: Go, C++, Java/C#, Python/Ruby, Haskell/Elixir, Javascript/TypeScript etc. and expect it to be just as popular. There's a whole lot of legacy projects written in older languages and they have to be maintained, even though some stuff does get ported to Rust in the meantime.)
I get that Rust or C++ has more power or expressiveness, but neither of those come without additional cognitive effort for us non-CS types. But if I don’t _need_ to work in Rust to get my work done, why bother ?
Go is good enough for me, Rust for others, etc. Hating a technology that you can choose not to use seems futile.
Only if I were adamant enough to quit each time it happens (I say this having joined a team that was explicitly Java/Scala-focused, and yet.)