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Sorry, I had thought that it was quite obvious: JS, PHP, and Go are almost exclusively used for web-related tasks. Yes, one can find other usage examples, but b

by fnl 9y ago

Sorry, I had thought that it was quite obvious: JS, PHP, and Go are almost exclusively used for web-related tasks. Yes, one can find other usage examples, but by and large, that's their main field of application. To expand on this, imagine building some complex application framework with these web-oriented languages. Without decent abstractions and insufficient typed programming support (see e.g. TypeScript to JS transpiling, or writing your own preprocessor macros to simulate generics in Go to avoid having interface{} everywhere, etc), and certainly no support for annotations, macros and other meta-programming techniques. Yes, not all of that high-level stuff is great and takes time to master, and so I understand the niche of Go & PHP & ss-JS: You need to quickly scale up your web services startup, which is often poorly paid work, and so you can't afford experienced developers. Having a simple, common, easy web services development language where you can hire any freshman and get them productive is great. So I'm not saying Go is bad or useless, but it only fits a (big - even, possibly the biggest in software engineering) specific case. ASP, PHP and Node.JS et al. are horrible compared to Go at that, but were the options you had before Go came along, so it's a godsend for web developers. I hope that explains why I don't see Go as comparable to complex, high-level languages - and in no way in competition with them, in fact.

fauigerzigerk 9y ago
PHP does indeed have features that make it more suitable for writing server side page templates, and JavaScript has a unique position in client side web development. But I see very little in terms of features or problems they solve that distinguishes Java, JavaScript, Go, Scala and C# from each other when it comes to writing Web backends. It's essentially a cultural choice. So comparing them (and many others) is totally fair game in my opinion.
- fnl 9y ago
  > I see very little in terms of features or problems they solve that distinguishes Java, JavaScript, Go, Scala and C# from each other when it comes to writing Web backends. So in a way, we agree, as that was my whole point - Go & it's predecessors (ASP, PHP, JS, ...) are mostly only good for Web backends: E.g., literally all Go developers I know personally are either fresh out of college or ex PHP programmers, ASPers and JS hackers, and all work exclusively on web development stuff. (But my sample size is maybe a dozen companies, so that's possibly biased, I agree.)
  - fauigerzigerk 9y ago
    What I disagree with first and foremost is your claim that Go is not an alternative for JVM/.NET languages and hence shouldn't be compared to them. All of these languages are direct competitors in a number of areas today (Web backends, infrastructure services, database systems) and based on language/runtime capabilities (as opposed to cultural and library availability) I see almost no area where there is no potential overlap in the future. Also, what a language is currently used for and what it is good for are two completely different things. There was a time when Java was mostly used for Applets and desktop user interfaces. It wasn't good at either.
    - fnl 9y ago
      For the sake of argument, let's assume Go were equal to Java and C# (nb, I think that is not true, but let's look at the issue from that perspective). Can Go replace C#? That's MS land and comes with the .Net platform. I think nobody will think Go is even remotely gathering its following from C# and the amount of tooling you get there is probably the largest set you can get. What about Java? That has 20 years of entrenched Enterprise usage. So to make a dent on that, it not only has to have equal languages facilities, it also needs an equivalent ecosystem (maybe?) and, crucially, has to be better: Java replaced C++ as it's a much better fit at what it's used for due to GC and "no" resource management. But I certainly don't see anything that Go does that makes it much better over Java as Java was in it's day over C++. So no, I don't see Go replacing .Net or the JVM anytime soon.
      - fauigerzigerk 9y ago
        That is a long list of straw man arguments. You keep refuting claims I never made while ignoring my point. I never claimed that Go is seeing any significant uptake in Java's or C#'s historical strongholds. I'm not talking about current usage at all. I also didn't say that Go is going to replace .NET or the JVM. I didn't even say that Go is better at anything. None of what you keep going on about has even the slightest thing to do with the point I was making. My point is very simple: Go, Java, Scala, C# and their most widely used implementations have similar enough technical capabilities to be useful for many of the same tasks. Therefore it is useful to compare them.
camus2 9y ago
> JS, PHP, and Go are almost exclusively used for web-related tasks JS is used for GUI tasks too, so your point seems totally arbitrary. Java is heavily used to write servers and services as well. > I hope that explains why I don't see Go as comparable to complex, high-level languages - and in no way in competition with them, in fact. Javascript and PHP are complex high-level languages as well. Your point doesn't make any sense. Go is the way it is because it was designed that people who rejected 30 years of type theory. But now they have a problem, because they repeated the same mistakes as C and now they are planing to break everything with Go2? they just quietly admitted they were wrong, it's time to admit you are wrong as well.

by fnl 9y ago

fauigerzigerk 9y ago

PHP does indeed have features that make it more suitable for writing server side page templates, and JavaScript has a unique position in client side web development. But I see very little in terms of features or problems they solve that distinguishes Java, JavaScript, Go, Scala and C# from each other when it comes to writing Web backends. It's essentially a cultural choice. So comparing them (and many others) is totally fair game in my opinion.

fnl 9y ago
> I see very little in terms of features or problems they solve that distinguishes Java, JavaScript, Go, Scala and C# from each other when it comes to writing Web backends. So in a way, we agree, as that was my whole point - Go & it's predecessors (ASP, PHP, JS, ...) are mostly only good for Web backends: E.g., literally all Go developers I know personally are either fresh out of college or ex PHP programmers, ASPers and JS hackers, and all work exclusively on web development stuff. (But my sample size is maybe a dozen companies, so that's possibly biased, I agree.)
- fauigerzigerk 9y ago
  What I disagree with first and foremost is your claim that Go is not an alternative for JVM/.NET languages and hence shouldn't be compared to them. All of these languages are direct competitors in a number of areas today (Web backends, infrastructure services, database systems) and based on language/runtime capabilities (as opposed to cultural and library availability) I see almost no area where there is no potential overlap in the future. Also, what a language is currently used for and what it is good for are two completely different things. There was a time when Java was mostly used for Applets and desktop user interfaces. It wasn't good at either.
  - fnl 9y ago
    For the sake of argument, let's assume Go were equal to Java and C# (nb, I think that is not true, but let's look at the issue from that perspective). Can Go replace C#? That's MS land and comes with the .Net platform. I think nobody will think Go is even remotely gathering its following from C# and the amount of tooling you get there is probably the largest set you can get. What about Java? That has 20 years of entrenched Enterprise usage. So to make a dent on that, it not only has to have equal languages facilities, it also needs an equivalent ecosystem (maybe?) and, crucially, has to be better: Java replaced C++ as it's a much better fit at what it's used for due to GC and "no" resource management. But I certainly don't see anything that Go does that makes it much better over Java as Java was in it's day over C++. So no, I don't see Go replacing .Net or the JVM anytime soon.
    - fauigerzigerk 9y ago
      That is a long list of straw man arguments. You keep refuting claims I never made while ignoring my point. I never claimed that Go is seeing any significant uptake in Java's or C#'s historical strongholds. I'm not talking about current usage at all. I also didn't say that Go is going to replace .NET or the JVM. I didn't even say that Go is better at anything. None of what you keep going on about has even the slightest thing to do with the point I was making. My point is very simple: Go, Java, Scala, C# and their most widely used implementations have similar enough technical capabilities to be useful for many of the same tasks. Therefore it is useful to compare them.

camus2 9y ago

> JS, PHP, and Go are almost exclusively used for web-related tasks JS is used for GUI tasks too, so your point seems totally arbitrary. Java is heavily used to write servers and services as well. > I hope that explains why I don't see Go as comparable to complex, high-level languages - and in no way in competition with them, in fact. Javascript and PHP are complex high-level languages as well. Your point doesn't make any sense. Go is the way it is because it was designed that people who rejected 30 years of type theory. But now they have a problem, because they repeated the same mistakes as C and now they are planing to break everything with Go2? they just quietly admitted they were wrong, it's time to admit you are wrong as well.