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Fossidarity wrote (edited )

A comment from HackerNews hits the spot for me:

I can't speak for Go's genesis within Google, but outside of Google, this underanalysed political stance dividing programmers into "trustworthy" and "not" underlies many arguments about the language.>

This summarises my opinion of Go that has been forming recently, that it's a replacement for Java.

Java was the "safe" choice. Many engineers knew it, bad engineers couldn't be that bad in it and would manage to produce something. They could be handed an architecture spec and implement it word for word without doing much translation to the Java language. But I don't think good engineers could "shine" with it.

It normalised all engineers around some median of productivity, and made projects predictable.

I believe Go is doing the same thing in some ways. It's not supposed to allow good engineers to find great ways of expressing complex architectures (however necessary that may be), it's designed to let engineers of all skill levels hit all problems with a Go shaped hammer and get something that looks inoffensive, boring and predictable.

This is very unsurprising given that it came out of a large engineering organisation. Google have many engineers of a wide range of skill levels, and normalising engineering is more important than doing it better.

I realise Google probably has a higher than average engineering ability, maybe far higher than average, but they still have a wide range, and I also include in this engineers who might be fantastic frontend engineers, who have to get stuck into some system software, for example.

I also think that the areas Go is trying to cover is better covered by other programming languages, for example Rust with system programming.

Also: https://grimoire.ca/dev/go

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[deleted] 0 wrote

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Fossidarity wrote

My thought still hold true for desktop and backend cases, but I agree that I'd rather have a Go/Java app than an Electron one. Actually the point you made about FOSS software with thousands of developers is one against Go in my opinion because Go doesn't have strict language/syntax style guidelines as opposed to Rust, which will result in every library reinventing the wheel like with C/C++ libraries.

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Fossidarity wrote

I'm also skeptical about anything Google releases as "Open Source", seeing how Android is also "Open Source" but is still rarely accepting Pull Requests from contributors outside of Google. Maybe Go is different but I'll first have to see it before believing it.

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[deleted] 0 wrote

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Fossidarity wrote

Well yeah they said the same thing about Android and look how that turned out..

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Fossidarity wrote

Well yeah they said the same thing about Android and look how that turned out..

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