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I'm curious as to what makes you think that Java is preferable to Go for a large webapp that "spends most of its time talking to databases or message queues".

I'm curious as to what makes you think that Java is preferable to Go for a large webapp that "spends most of its time talking to databases or message queues". I would have thought that the Go's concurrency model would give it an edge.

baq 10y ago
last time i tried to do serious work with go and mssql, i ran away screaming. maybe situation isn't that dire now (this was almost a couple of years ago), but it's hard to beat java in db connectivity. for the record, i ran to python.
- Zikes 10y ago
  I've used Go in a lot of database work as of late, and it's done a fine job for me. I've used it to connect to MS SQL, PostgreSQL, and Teradata. The Teradata connection was a little tricky, as nobody had written a Go/Teradata driver yet and I had to route it through Windows ODBC, but once I had that sorted out it worked just fine. I only started using Go in the last couple of years, so I don't know how different it is now from when you tried it last, but I bet you would be pleasantly surprised if you gave it another look.
allan_s 10y ago
> I'm curious as to what makes you think that Java is preferable to Go for a large webapp that because your large webapp is made by a large team, over a large time span. The same as you don't deploy on power8 but on x86, because x86 is more common than power8 and cheaper. One of your java programmers leave ? replace him is easy Need to find java programmers ready to do shitty and boring debugging ? easy Your large webapp is in maintenance mode and nobody internally wants to touch it, so you decide to find a cheap company abroad to outsource the maintenance ? easy Hard to find these three with Go (or rust, and I love both) because right now it's taught in no large scale university nor a lot of people have been exposed "accidentaly" by it. SO if you have been exposed to Go (or rust) and decide to stik with it it's because you actively decide to, not just because of market force. Hence so you don't belongs to those who will want to do shitty bug fixing 8 hours ago, nor to the price of a developer people hire just to have two more hands, nor the kind who will accept a job under-payed for a outsourcing company. Java, permits your management to feel they can scale the development
- steveklabnik 10y ago
  Not that this invalidates your point, but there are two university classes being taught in Rust right now; I had the pleasure of guest lecturing at Penn's yesterday, in fact. Here's hoping to more of those in the future. I certainly agree this is a big plus for Java.
  - allan_s 10y ago
    ah great to know ! I also hope to see more in the future. here I was playing the devil's advocate, but to have been at both seat (having hard time to hire as a CTO and needing to fallback on PHP in one company / trying to push Rust in my current one) I now see why chosing a stack is not only about tehcnical merits.
- MichaelGG 10y ago
  I think the key word is "shitty". If you're working on a shitty app then aim for shitty languages with developers that don't care. Hopefully we aim to not work on such shitty apps. And in such a case, the overhead of learning a new language is dwarfed by the overhead of learning the domain-specific stuff. And Rust, like any good language seems to have a, coherent(?), or elegant design. Stuff makes sense. As compared to some languages where things are just thrown in willy-nilly. This makes Rust easier to learn, as you can somewhat reason about how things must work.
pjmlp 10y ago
Java has support for Go-like concurrency and much more in java.lang.concurrency packages. The only difference is lack of special syntax and being harder to use for basic blog post examples. Usually people that compare parallel programming in C++, Java or .NET vs Go, never went beyond the basic thread features.

baq 10y ago

last time i tried to do serious work with go and mssql, i ran away screaming. maybe situation isn't that dire now (this was almost a couple of years ago), but it's hard to beat java in db connectivity. for the record, i ran to python.

Zikes 10y ago
I've used Go in a lot of database work as of late, and it's done a fine job for me. I've used it to connect to MS SQL, PostgreSQL, and Teradata. The Teradata connection was a little tricky, as nobody had written a Go/Teradata driver yet and I had to route it through Windows ODBC, but once I had that sorted out it worked just fine. I only started using Go in the last couple of years, so I don't know how different it is now from when you tried it last, but I bet you would be pleasantly surprised if you gave it another look.

allan_s 10y ago

> I'm curious as to what makes you think that Java is preferable to Go for a large webapp that because your large webapp is made by a large team, over a large time span. The same as you don't deploy on power8 but on x86, because x86 is more common than power8 and cheaper. One of your java programmers leave ? replace him is easy Need to find java programmers ready to do shitty and boring debugging ? easy Your large webapp is in maintenance mode and nobody internally wants to touch it, so you decide to find a cheap company abroad to outsource the maintenance ? easy Hard to find these three with Go (or rust, and I love both) because right now it's taught in no large scale university nor a lot of people have been exposed "accidentaly" by it. SO if you have been exposed to Go (or rust) and decide to stik with it it's because you actively decide to, not just because of market force. Hence so you don't belongs to those who will want to do shitty bug fixing 8 hours ago, nor to the price of a developer people hire just to have two more hands, nor the kind who will accept a job under-payed for a outsourcing company. Java, permits your management to feel they can scale the development

steveklabnik 10y ago
Not that this invalidates your point, but there are two university classes being taught in Rust right now; I had the pleasure of guest lecturing at Penn's yesterday, in fact. Here's hoping to more of those in the future. I certainly agree this is a big plus for Java.
- allan_s 10y ago
  ah great to know ! I also hope to see more in the future. here I was playing the devil's advocate, but to have been at both seat (having hard time to hire as a CTO and needing to fallback on PHP in one company / trying to push Rust in my current one) I now see why chosing a stack is not only about tehcnical merits.
MichaelGG 10y ago
I think the key word is "shitty". If you're working on a shitty app then aim for shitty languages with developers that don't care. Hopefully we aim to not work on such shitty apps. And in such a case, the overhead of learning a new language is dwarfed by the overhead of learning the domain-specific stuff. And Rust, like any good language seems to have a, coherent(?), or elegant design. Stuff makes sense. As compared to some languages where things are just thrown in willy-nilly. This makes Rust easier to learn, as you can somewhat reason about how things must work.

pjmlp 10y ago

Java has support for Go-like concurrency and much more in java.lang.concurrency packages. The only difference is lack of special syntax and being harder to use for basic blog post examples. Usually people that compare parallel programming in C++, Java or .NET vs Go, never went beyond the basic thread features.