Ask HN: GO or Ruby on Rails? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: GO or Ruby on Rails?

4 pointssciguy779 comments

Seem like there's a lot of Go > Rails speak going on, and as someone who's currently using Rails but never tried Go I'd like to hear your opinions. Should I drop Rails?

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Depends on what you do. If you're looking to do freelancing then you'll find a lot more jobs if you're strong in Ruby.

Go is growing rapidly and we'll probably see quite a few full time jobs looking for Go skills in the years ahead. So if you want to invest in future hire-ability then Go isn't a bad place to use your time.

If you're looking for a contemporary alternative to Ruby, you might also like to investigate Clojure (http://clojure.org/) - it is far more mature than Golang, has excellent libraries for web development and arguably has made better language design decisions (no shared mutable state). It also has excellent support for clientside web development, which is becoming increasingly important.

I never could stand the Ruby syntax and after a few days with Go I loved it. I would definitely recommend giving it a shot. Web work took some time to get used to but once you get the hang of it things just feel natural (and I guess that's what happens when you have the brains of the Go team).

That's interesting. I too am not a huge fan of the Ruby syntax, but I've learned to live with it for the most part.

It does make me miss Python though.

One nice thing about Rails is that there are a LOT of resources out there for learning it like One Month Rails, CodeSchool, etc. I haven't seen the same for Go (yet).

That is definitely the case. The one extremely important part though is that even the standard library source is readable and the documentation is incredible. There are a few books around including on on leanpub (https://leanpub.com/go-thestdlib). Effective Go (http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html) is a great lesson for syntax also.

EDIT: add links

I personally find Ruby's syntax much nicer than Go's, though I prefer Python's to both of those.

How hard is Go to pick up for beginners? Any recommendations for basic tutorials?

"A Tour of Go" http://tour.golang.org/

Thanks for this!

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