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Comment by gngeal | Hacker News Reader

I bet that in 10 years time, once the hype has died down, Go will be seen as a middle-of-the-road language for middle-of-the road applications. A low-risk, conservative, sensible, and ultimately boring choice.

In ten years, Go will be seen as what Oberon is seen as today: essentially all the things you mention, plus the fact that there will be a dedicated community of people who like the no-nonsense "do more with less" approach that is peculiar to this family of languages and don't want to live without it. Plus, Go will most likely have some evolutionary continuation anyway.

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You really think so? I think that implies that it remains unsuccessful, which (given its current trajectory) seems unlikely.

I think it's more likely that in 10 years, Go will be the new Java. Big companies (besides Google) will use it, Hacker News will hate it, consultants will write books about it, and language geeks will be trying to replace it. Recall that Java also had a no-nonsense "do more with less" approach. The problem is that once a language gets popular, it's inevitably pushed into more and more domains where it's unsuitable, folks need to learn it to earn a living, and all the folks who define themselves by what languages they know will move on to greener pastures.

The only way a language can remain cool for decades at a time is to "avoid success at all costs", which was actually one of Simon Peyton-Jones's goals for Haskell (which has remained remarkably true to that ideal). Otherwise Stroustrop's Law kicks in: "There are two kinds of languages: the ones nobody likes, and the ones nobody uses."

C is very successful and barely hated (C, not C++).

Yeah, C and to some extent Python seem to be exceptions to Stroustrop's Law. There was a poll on this recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6527104

My pet theory on why is that both of these languages didn't try to be middle-of-the-road, good-for-everything languages, they were created to solve a specific problem and were very well designed for that niche. So programmers use C for systems programming and when they need to be close to the metal, they don't use it for large applications with ambiguous requirements - and so all the hate that the latter engenders gets directed to C++ and Java. And programmers use Python when they need to prototype stuff, script things, or write a quick tool where performance doesn't matter - and when performance does matter, they either end up calling out to C (which is actually good for that) or they end up rewriting in Java and cursing out that language.

I like C, but I also like the type-safe, efficient containers and generic algorithms of C++.

In many ways, the containers and generic algorithms of C++ may not be necessarily that efficient: http://datadraw.sourceforge.net

You really think so? I think that implies that it remains unsuccessful, which (given its current trajectory) seems unlikely.

Oops. I meant "seen technically", not "seen socially".

I think it's more likely that in 10 years, Go will be the new Java.

I'd rather think of Go as the new C. :-)

Also, as far the "do more with less" and "no nonsense" stuff is concerned - have you seen the spec of Java on one side, and the specs for Go and Oberon on the other? There's quite some difference.

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