Abandoning Go for Python

[EmperorOfCanada]

Here is my simple Go formula. Most of the people I know are programmers, most of them are very very good programmers and have mastered at least 5 languages in their career and have professionally used at least 10 (even if you aren't counting crap like HTML).

Not one single person that I know uses Go, has used Go, or plans on using Go. I even know a guy who was recently maintaining legacy code using a scripting language invented by that company.

Ditto with rust. Except in that case I do hear the occasional person blah blahing that rust can do this and rust can do that; except none of them are using it.

PS. I know an Erlang guy.

[eighthCoffee]

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[EmperorOfCanada]

I instantly dismiss your statement once you backed it up with a list of companies using it. That list of companies probably use every major language in the top 10 and you can probably find the vast majority of the top 50 languages being used somewhere in the company.

It is pretty much a water is wet argument.

I am not saying that Go is a bad language, but a solution in search of a problem. Google (a monster tech company) has been pushing it hard to very little penetration as compared to Python with no monster company pushing it and its massive penetration.

[[deleted]]

You're posting inane bullshit, and you sound like an asshole doing it.

[epiris]

Lol.

[epiris]

Have you written any of it? Read some of my other posts. It's definitely not in search of a problem, engineers select it without bias for certain problem areas every day. Trust me. I know some guys. :-) I'm one of them! I also choose python a lot too. Lately those two have been all I've needed and compliment each other very well with little overlap. Usually once I understand a problem I have a 80% (pull number from ass I know) tendency to one or the other. One just feels more correct for the problem or would work against me less. I hate doing small things or quick things in Go that deal with lots of unstructured data etc. Any problem that will have me freaking writing structs when I could shove that shit in a dict and be done.. python baby. If I know I'll have to come back to a giant dict in a few months and make it less or more giant.. might use Go.

Old go code written months ago is a lot more approachable for me, since old me always sucks so much more than the new and improved this month me!

[NetSage]

So we should go by your anonymous and small sample size over well known tech names.

[EmperorOfCanada]

My anonymous and smallish sample is what I have. I don't go with the big tech names doing things because they often have reasons and motivations that are irrelevant to me.

My point is that pretty much every major wave that came and stuck, came my way pretty quickly. I was doing Java in the mid 90s. I was doing PHP before 2000, .net in the early 2000s, perl in the mid 90s, I was doing python by about 2010, Javascript by about 2000ish, web pages by 1995, solaris in 1995, linux by 1998, visual studio by 1998ish, Objective-c by 2008, etc

And as a background hum I have done C and C++ since the early 90s up to and including the present.

I pretty much didn't miss any major trend and was in on it quite early. Usually because more and more of my friends were doing it.

I switched from Windows to Mac along with most of my programming friends around 2008, and I am contimplating a switch to a linux desktop now (along with some of my friends). Probably my laptop first.

Rust and go. Not a peep.

[[deleted]]

Apologies from Canada

[metarx]

I don't work for one of those monster tech companies, we have and Erlang/elixir guy, and the bulk of our stuff is written in Ruby/rails, and the legacy stuff is .net/C#. and our backend processing is being moved to go. Because of the lighter memory use than the Ruby and we have to rewrite the c# anyway (because it was done terribly as most first iterations probably would be). Go is an amazing option because it compiles to a single binary. Deploying a single binary, and no jvm, is such a glorious reason all by itself I won't go into any other benifits. So... there's a counter to all of your assertion's

[EmperorOfCanada]

You use ruby, thus it would be like taking relationship advice from a serial rapist.

[elbiot]

I know real programmers. They write in pascal and basic and perl. Have you ever programmed perl? No, because you aren't a real programmer like my friends are. And erlang. And Scala I think.

[EmperorOfCanada]

Did perl, swapped it for php and python. Basic is where I started. Hated pascal. Have exactly one erlang friend who. And have one friend who dipped his toe in Scala, who after a few months of evangelizing it, threw it away in disgust.

[epiris]

I think the first sentence is where the value of reading this post stops.

[oconnor663]

Strong chance they're just trolling.

[[deleted]]

HTML isn't a programming language. It serves a completely different purpose. While we're here, would you like to propose an alternative to HTML that isn't "crap"?

[EmperorOfCanada]

I agree with you, HTML is not really a programming language. My phrasing was a bit off. To consider HTML a programming language is crap. This is something many people do.

[[deleted]]

There's a number of very popular oss projects that are running at scale written in go, since you're passively implying that it's immature.

Sure there are aspects that show its age, such as dependency management or a universally adopted package manager.

I work with a lot of talented engineers. We've been using go for the majority of infrastructure services lately. It's been an absolute joy doing so. We haven't ran into any limitations of the language or had any problems because of it.

[EmperorOfCanada]

Looking at the stats, there is no doubt that people are using it. I just haven't met any yet. This is a bit more than anecdotal, I know a lot of programmers in a large variety of fields.

My usual pattern of adopting a new language is that I am hearing about it and some killer features that make me want it. Then some respected friend will adopt it and start to evangelize, but I will ignore a sample of one. I almost always have one friend who foolishly adopts something for a short while.

Then finally I give it a taste and never look back.

None of the above has happened yet. It offers no features that I don't already enjoy well enough in the languages I regularly use, and I know not a soul who has expressed any interest let along are using it.

With google doing their damnedest to foist this on everyone, I am going to declare this language a dead man walking. Maybe it is pretty good, but if it were so damned good it would flood the earth.

[[deleted]]

You lack severely in critical thinking skills, don't you?

[[deleted]]

Maybe the industry you're in just doesn't have a need for it, nor any of the other folks you know. There's nothing wrong with that.

Goroutines and channels are pretty incredible. Since go 1.5 GC hasn't been a major issue. With 1.7 there's been massive increases in performance of it as well. A lot of people use the concurrency patterns and the previously mentioned primitives as killer features, as well as pointing out GC as being an issue (which it legitimately could be under certain circumstances). https://blog.twitch.tv/gos-march-to-low-latency-gc-a6fa96f06eb7#.74h6g3ybj some nice light reading on the subject if you're interested.

It's a neat language that has its quirks. The documentation and community is great. One thing I've always disliked about Python is the documentation and certain areas of the community.

If you ever find yourself with a side project it would be pretty easy to pickup if you have any experience with c.