Google Trends: Golang is popular in China | Hacker News Reader

Google Trends: Golang is popular in China

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43 pointsgejjaxxita43 comments

It's anecdotal, but I live a fair bit of the time in Guangzhou and noticed a lot of Chinese developers I've met there have taken great interest in Go. The surge in popularity seems to have been since an impressively detailed ebook in Chinese on writing web applications in Go[1] was released a couple of years back now, and remains a very popular project on GitHub.

It is worth noting though that the most popular languages in China reflect the major languages around the rest of the world, a GitHub search for a very common Chinese character[2] shows that for the Chinese open source community.

[1] https://github.com/astaxie/build-web-application-with-golang

[2] https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=%E7%9A%84&ref=cmdform&s=s...

I went to the inaugural meetup for the Singapore Golang group last night, the author of that ebook (Asta Xie) was presenting a general introduction to Go :)

For what it's worth, he mentioned that an increasing amount of companies in China are now using Go in production.

What do you do while in Guangzhou? I spent a week there while adopting my oldest child (US Consulate). We may have been in a "sheltered" part of the city, but I thought it was beautiful and the people were friendly.

Another anecdote : The Kick-Off GoLang Meetup was held in Singapore last night. There was a large Chinese contingent in comparison to other meetups (turnout 20-30, majority Chinese. SingaporeJS turnout 100-150, much more mixed crowd : Where mixed in SG programming seems to usually imply a large number/majority of Western ex-pats).

The main speaker was the developer behind Beego (https://github.com/astaxie), who showed slides that included usage at Chinese companies, etc). Apparently there are quite a few Chinese on-line gaming companies testing the limits of the language (particularly GC-wise).

Google Trends also tracks "Go" (Programming Language) as a topic: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F09gbxjr

For which the order of regional interest is different and somewhat less lopsided, though China remains an outlier at the top.

I'm not too sure what the results mean, though. For example, if Google Trends is to be believed, RWBY (an American-made anime-esque web series) is massively popular in Taiwan: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F0vsrh7z

and Mongolians are incredibly fascinated with Elon Musk: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F03nzf1

But I'm at a loss to explain how that could be the case.

"...and Mongolians are incredibly fascinated with Elon Musk".

I would bet that is a false positive (note it's the fuzzier 'topic' not 'search term') from Mongolian musk ox.

RWBY is actually popular in Taiwan. There are fansubs and I think fandubs.

Remember that the sheer number of people makes all country-based comparisons pointless.

Here, China has 3 times more searches for Golang but has a more than 100 times bigger population. That would make Go more popular in Sweden... except if you consider that not everyone searches for "golang", which is much more visible when you look at the city-based comparison (a more accurate description of what's happening)

Is that really how Google gauges interest? Raw number of searches? I would think it's more useful to normalize in some way (perhaps by searches across all countries) for the very reason you state.

If so, maybe what's happening is that Baidu doesn't provide very good results for Golang, so a relatively large proportion of Google's small market presence in China are people who jumped to Google just to search for Golang.

There are already three Golang-based forums (built with Go, talk about Go) in China. While for Node.js , Ruby, Python, we don't see these many.

* http://golangtc.com

* http://studygolang.com

* http://bbs.go-china.org

Also to mention, Swift is a surprisingly hot topic in Chinese Developer community:

* http://swift.sh/

* http://www.douban.com/group/522213/

And project on translating Swift was quickly started:

* https://github.com/numbbbbb/the-swift-programming-language-i...

There is Ruby China https://ruby-china.org/

Is this probably because of the native unicode support in the language?

Check out Groovy's popularity on bintray maven in China. Visit https://bintray.com/groovy/maven/groovy/view/statistics then click country.

700,000 downloads in the last month, with 646,000 of them from China and only 21,000 from the US and 3000 from Germany, the 3 largest downloading countries.

Of course the point I'm making is web-based queries aren't enough to ascertain a programming language's adoption.

Why are there no programming languages that use native vocabulary from other spoken languages (e.g. Mandarin)? Couldn't somebody make a coffeescript-like transpiler that converts if/for/which/import etc and library methods like printf/webserver/listen to another language? I would think writing code in a language you might not understand well would be a handicap.

Example: https://github.com/chanxuehong/wechat

And as your link shows, writing the documentation in any other language than English is a 100% efficient way to totally handicap an open-source project...

That would definitely be true if there weren't a lot of native speakers of your language in the open source community. The link I gave was (I believe) in Mandarin, and there are a lot of Mandarin speaking individuals in the open source world.

I'm not a native English speaker but I would never consider writing non-English technical documentation. The case of a potential OSS contributor having meaningful contributions but not understanding English sufficiently to understand the documentation is too rare to worry about.

I believe there are tons of languages in local vocabulary, they just, well, local, so we don't heard about them often in global internets. For example, almost every business in xUSSR uses 1C:Enterprise system, where code is written in Russian: https://www.google.com/webhp#q=1%D1%81+%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B4&tb... (although code is not the cornerstone in that huge business framework).

I'm not sure Go is more popular in China than in US. Based on what I heard, The companies using Go is definitely more in US, and it's the same case for online discussion and offline meetups.

I don't quite get why the search traffic for "Golang" is so much bigger in China, unless there are some companies there use Go in their production in large scale secretly

Maybe they just communicate in Chinese. That does not seem unlikely, and likely is the same as "secret" for you.

I'm not sure if "not being able to understand Chinese therefore all their communication looks like secret" is the reason for me to get downvotes. FWIW, I'm native Chinese speaker living in US and have been closely following the Go's usage in both places

NodeJS too is popular in China

https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=nodejs

But not Node.JS

https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=node.js

One of the Go developers did say that Go has a big following in China in GopherCon 2014, thanks to Windows.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=u-k...

Given google now only occupies less than 1% of the search engine market in China[1], it makes even less sense why China's trending is an outlier among all the countries. [1]http://engine.data.cnzz.com/

I think actually the reason is programming is popular in China. So based on the population (that knows how to write code), eventually all programming languages will appear to be popular in China on Google Trends.

you may be correct, however I have a reasonably popular golang library on github and a significant amount of folks that star it appear to be from China, a much higher percentage than my projects in other languages.

I'm curious, do they tend to submit pull requests and issues?

I've noticed that too mainly because I see lot's of stargazers for https://github.com/fatih/vim-go to be Chinese people.

but scala is killing it compared to go:

https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=golang%2C%20%2Fm%2F0...

I don't see how Scala is "killing it" in China[1]. China is even not in top 10 in terms of contribution for Scala's search traffic.

[1]: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F09gbxjr%2C%20...

whoa you're so damn right actually ... the trends weren't specific to china ... i assumed they were since i edited the OP's link

actually it seems Go is seriously killing it in China:

https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Go%2C%20Scala&geo=CN...

but otherwise Scala has been doing better with Go making a case for itself

your link compares scala to the phrase "go".