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Comment by jhh | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have examples of people migrating from Go to Java? I suspect this has more to do with moving away from functional and/or reactive programming.

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Go is a relatively young language. Building a product in Go, only to port it to Java has to be a rare phenomenon.

Go is 12 years old (1.0 in March 2012). Young compared to Java, but old enough for codebases to have gone through a few write-rewrite phases. Case in point - this thread is about code that Walmart got when it acquired a company founded in 2014.

Sure, but Walmart is moving from a niche language to a mainstream one. Significantly easier to make that business justification. Go to Java should require a lot more political capital to champion such a change.

For what it’s worth, the 2023 stack overflow survey said 14% of professional programmers used Go vs 1% for F#. (Java at 30%)

My team wants to do that. Only because the rest of the org uses Java.

Given the description also describes moving from a custom event sourcing engine to Kafka it doesn't seem to be moving away from reactive programming. As much as anything it seems like something of an "Apache Effect" that some Enterprise Highly Paid Consultants came in, told them they were doing "everything wrong" and that everything would be better with off the shelf open source components and that the "best" language for working with off the shelf open source components is Java. Most of that isn't true in various ways, but the number of Enterprise HPCs that love Java despite that language's deficiencies is surprisingly high. (Though maybe not that surprising given Oracle owns Java today and has always directly and indirectly owned a lot of HPCs in the Enterprise space.)

There's a very strong "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" effect surrounding Java. I can list specific situations where I'd prefer another platform all day long. But there are only a few specific situations I can think of where I would say Java is not a defensible choice.

And giving advice that's optimally defensible is the Highly Paid Consultant's actual job. You don't bring a consultant like that in when you're playing to win; you do it when you're playing to not lose.

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