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Comment by doodoostew | Hacker News Reader

I've worked on large Go codebases on large teams at large orgs with large dreams. That garbage us straight up unmaintainable in the large and nobody can convince me otherwise. I have deep knowledge of the language, platform, used it for over a decade. It sucks.

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My experience is directly counter. I've worked in half a dozen very large orgs and moving from interpreted languages to Go in each one made the system easier to reason about, more maintainable, and easier to onboard new team members. Go strikes a balance between all the competing priorities that has, in my personal experience, improved the engineering velocity across half a dozen companies comprised of hundreds of developers each. For two organizations, they made very coupled and hard to reason about code bases, but those were vastly easier to reason about than had they been written in, say, python or ruby.

Compared to a language like Python or Ruby, yes it's better for larger programs. Compared to the likes C# or Java? Not a chance.

Most former java devs I have worked with prefer Go after a year or so. Sample size is probably around 40 java devs leading to about 35ish Converts.

However, I have only worked with about 5 or so former C# and while they liked Go, they missed C#. Only one preferred Go.

C# is on my shortlist to pick up.

I think this entirely depends on what kind of Java is being written. If you are Java developer on say Spring stack, moving to Go never ends up well in my experience. On several projects I worked on there was a push (strong word, more like investigation/POC) to start writing some services etc in Go and there was almost universal rejection at the end. So I think there is more to just language selection/preference but more like an entire ecosystem depending on what you are hacking

It sucks because?

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