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Don't underestimate how much our industry is driven by fashion, culture, corporate backing, historical coincidence and inertia. Very few decisions are based on
by fauigerzigerk 9y ago
Don't underestimate how much our industry is driven by fashion, culture, corporate backing, historical coincidence and inertia. Very few decisions are based on technical merit. Go read some of those "why we switched from X to Y". It's 99% rubbish ex-post rationalization of nothingness.
In my opinion there is only one significant technical dividing line between language implementations: Mandatory automatic garbage collection.
No other purely technical characteristic makes a whole lot of difference for the sort of problems that can be solved with comparable results using different language implementations.
That's why it doesn't make much sense to me to put Go in a different basket than Java or C#. Doesn't mean there is no reason to prefer one over the other of course.
- fnl 9y agoIf your baskets are GC vs. managed languages, I fully agree. But I don't think that comparing some contents in either of those baskets among each other necessarily is a task worth tackling...
- fauigerzigerk 9y agoSo if I'm starting a new project and I know that I can achieve the same result with either Go or Scala, how do I choose without comparing?
- fnl 9y agoWhat I meant is that the lack of features in Go has made it easy for us: All existing comparisons are probably sufficient. All you need to decide on now is if you prefer syntactic simplicity over percieved feature boat, if it's a web development project or not, and if you can benefit from existing code in your language of choice or not. Pick at least 2/3 to decide... :-)