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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

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threeseed·

No. In 10 years time it will sadly be forgotten like many of Google's experiments.

The low-risk, conservative, sensible and boring choice exists today. It's Java.

And as enterprises adopt functional programming via Scala/Clojure it will only cement those characteristics.

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I dislike Google for pulling the plug on consumer products as well, but this is a product designed for use at Google and I understand they are writing/converting a lot of code in it. So I think you underestimate Google's backing in this case, which is probably the reason Go has seen one of the fastest rises in popularity of any language, ever -- if not the fastest.

Go has made me enjoy programming again -- I find it very freeing not to have to use Java or .NET and memorize 40,000 builtin classes. Yes, Go is similar to Java in terms of its being a "middle of the road" conservative language. But (a)it's conservative for the 21st Century, rather than the 20th, and (b)ditching the virtual machine and bloat of Java is a good thing IMO.

I don't think it's the fault of the VM. There have been other languages that worked with intermediate code, and they weren't inefficient. It's just that fixing old stuff after you get millions of users leaves you with a very strange language, even a stranger one than if you add completely new stuff along the way. The latter is inevitable, but the former ought to be avoided. The Java people probably didn't realize in the beginning what they were building. (Well, of course, who would have, in their place?)

I think enterprises will rather adopt functional programming via Java.

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