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Comment by voidlogic | Hacker News Reader

As a Java/Python shop I think Netflix should evaluate Go after 1.1 RC comes out in April. Go is very popular with people who have heavily used both Java and Python (as well as C).

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I believe we do have one or two people here looking at Go.

Given our culture, there really is nothing stopping anyone from using it, other than the fact that they would have to figure out how to interact with the platform.

Anyone used or uses Erlang?

I know of at least one person that wrote a fairly significant chunk or erlang at netflix, but this was years ago just as we were moving into the cloud and now, as jedberg wrote, erlang would have a hard time working with the rest of the netflix stack.

I don't think so. I suppose it would be possible, but it might be hard to interact with the platform.

I've used go at netflix before to hack up a quick load test, but recently the vast majority of my non java/c++ code at netflix has been python for writing glue to interact with our ops infrastructure and julia, which recently supplanted python/pandas/scikit, for my my research oriented stuff.

But overall go is a really neat "systems" level language.

Just curious, why would this be downvoted?

Because it's not helpful to anyone. It just says "they should use my favourite toy instead of their favourite toy". No details about why or how it would help anyone anywhere ever. Just "Someone else should do a lot of work. Because I said so."

If I had to guess, I would say because GP didn't actually give any real reasons why adding complexity (a new language) would improve or solve a problem. Advocating languages is fine, we all have our pet languages, but it is important to remember they each are just one tool in the toolbox and that what is more important is how the language solves the problem well, instead of just blindly advocating one language over another.

Language comparison are so ridiculously multi-dimensional and my knowledge of Netflix's internal applications are shallow enough I thought specifics would be a waste of time. I see Go in general as a reaction to the overcomplexity of Java/C++ and the performance issues of Python/Ruby. Since Go seems to be popular with people who use Java/Python, and Netflix uses Java/Python, I was curious if Go was on the table. I would hardly call my original post blind advocacy...

Some folks would consider this as an attempt to hijack the discussion. I am not saying that is what you are trying to do but what some folks would think. It gets tedious sometimes when the post is specifically about "Python at whatever" and people post "Hey you should use this language instead."

Maybe that is why you were down voted. (FWIW, I did not down vote you.)

I posted this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5356913 today as a reply to someone who commented about Go on a post about programming languages today. It seems that (at least so far) I was correct.

Besides Google using Go for some things like part of Youtube and dl.google.com, CloudFlare, Heroku, Canonical, Torbit, SoundCloud, BBC, and others are using Go for parts of their back-end infrastructures.

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