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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> Google has been steadily moving away from "Go is a C++ replacement" (because it's not) and toward "Go is a Python/Ruby replacement." (which fits it _much_ better)

I don't see that Go is particularly good general replacement for C++ or Python/Ruby, it seems more of a good tool for the place where Python or Ruby's performance characteristics and less well developed support for concurrency/parallelism make them unattractive, but at the same time the relative heaviness and complexity of C++ makes it unattractive, and so neither seems to be the right choice.

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I think we're in violent agreement. I think people have been building stuff in Python/Ruby, and are seeing some of the drawbacks, and realize they're bigger than they thought.

Go is not particularly DRY. It's an entirely different design, not a superior version of the same thing.

Where does language like Dart fall into?

Dart has a broadly similar server side role to Go (the approach is very different) in that it falls between C++ and currently popular dynamic languages, plus it has a client-side role where it aims to be a better JS.

Obviously on the server side it overlaps with Go, but Google has the resources to do multiple efforts in parallel in areas they think are important to find what works best with real world experience.

In the history footnotes, unless Google manages to convince other browser vendors to adopt it.

Its a replacement for Java. C++ is still suited for situations where GC is impossible, Python/Ruby are still suitable for quick scripting. I think Go aims for everything in between.

I quite agree with that. Java & Go have a close typing system (static but not very elaborate, and java < 5 was lacking generics just like go), share a close philosophy (a simple language with no tricky corner, safer memory management, designed for programming in the large), have built-in concurrency mechanisms, and are even quite close when it comes to raw performance.

The history of many of the languages has been the same in regards to generics. C++ didn't have them, then templates where added. C# 1 didn't have them, but were quickly added (correctly) in 2. D didn't have them, later they were added. It is very common for a new language to avoid generics in the beginning, but it seems most come to agree, it was a mistake.

C# had them already internally in 1999, before the 1.0 release, they just decided to focus on other issues for the first release of .NET.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dsyme/archive/2011/03/15/net-c-gener...

On the functional languages world, parametric polymorphism has usually always been part of the first versions.

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