Hacker News Reader

I think he's talking more about the language, rather than the book.

You can have a book on APL or Forth that starts out in the first chapter targeting people new to programming, but that does not mean the language itself is the best choice.

Regarding Golang for novice coders, I would say it is an OK choice for a beginner, probably better than starting with Java, but not a good a choice as Python.

View on HN

I think this chapter is very helpful in answering this question:

http://www.golang-book.com/2/index.htm

Go's "Hello World" is not quite as complex as java, but a lot more complex than Python, in terms of number of concepts to explain.

Comparing "hello worlds" is a fairly poor way of getting an idea of how much complexity/boilerplate you can expect from a language. It's better to compare something more substantial, like quicksort implementations:

http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Sorting_algorithms/Quicksort#Pyt...

http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Sorting_algorithms/Quicksort#Go

Reply on news.ycombinator.com