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I think it's because there's a relatively large contingent on HN who dislike Google in general and therefore, by extension, anything they build/support. EDIT:

I think it's because there's a relatively large contingent on HN who dislike Google in general and therefore, by extension, anything they build/support. EDIT: Why the downvoting? Sure, there are valid issues with golang, but there are also a small but vocal minority on HN who enjoy being rude to Google because they don't like Google, which is what my comment relates to. I certainly don't have any axe to grind with the author, the article, or the commenter to whom I'm responding. It was just a perspective on why, in general, golang might get more of a slating than it perhaps deserves, and I acknowledge that amongst that there will obviously be some people who have many valid reasons not to like golang. Sheesh.

kmicklas 9y ago
Nah I worked at Google and even there most engineers didn't like Go.
stouset 9y ago
Or maybe it’s because we’ve tried golang repeatedly, been frustrated the entire way, and are desperately hoping that someone will help us understand what people actually see in the language. I work and live in SF. Of people I talk to in real life who’ve used golang for non-Google, non-toy projects, sentiment is at least 4-to-1 against it, and in my anecdata that ratio generally increases as people use it for longer. The one consistent praise I’ve heard that seems genuine (and that I don’t entirely disagree with) is that it’s easy for a new team member to jump on board and be productive. Which sounds great, but if this is what you’re optimizing for at (in my opinion) the expense of nearly everything else, then it seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy of high turnover.
- matt_m 9y ago
  Sure, I think I can explain some of what people might see in it. Obviously its strengths/weaknesses will depend on what language you compare it to, the article mentioned Java so I'll use that. 1) Value types - in Java if you want an array of objects of a non-primitive type, each one will be individually heap allocated (with some extra per-object overhead) and stored as an array of pointers (may change in Java 10). Go allows objects to be linear in memory with no overhead. 2) Slices everywhere - in Go slices are the default list representation. This allows any API that takes a list of objects to be passed a range of a bigger list, without copying/allocating. 3) Low-latency garbage collector - I believe Go has one of the lowest latency garbage collectors in common use (sub-1ms pauses). I realize Java has several options, but I think Go's is lower latency than all but some commercial/exotic ones like Zing. This is not saying the GC is better all around, just on latency. It's also relatively easy to minimize allocations in Go due to value types. 4) Low-overhead concurrency - lightweight tasks with no blocking/non-blocking dichotomy in APIs. But threads can scale up a lot, so this might not be a big benefit depending on the application. 5) Interior pointers - you can lay out structures linearly, and still use interior pointers. Also, you can use them as interfaces without allocating any 'boxed' objects. There's probably more, but these are the things that come to mind right now. Looking back on this list, all of them are performance related. So if an application isn't performance sensitive in any of these ways I guess it would be understandable that someone might not see much in it, compared to a language with a higher learning curve but a lot of conveniences like Kotlin. Things like capitalization don't seem that big an issue though... maybe because Go is a simple language the tooling is already pretty good, and you can easily rename to upper/lower case in an IDE like GoLand. For people unfamiliar with Go and want to see something more than hello world, I think an interesting project to look at is https://github.com/fogleman/pt https://github.com/fogleman/pt. It's not enormous but not trivial either and makes use of interfaces, goroutines etc. The author's other projects are great too.
eropple 9y ago
I think that's an uncharitable explanation. I'm very happy using the Google services I do and I pay them for my personal domain/email (have for the last decade or so). I think Kubernetes is a great idea and I run it in production. But it would be difficult to find a job that would pay me enough to deal with the frustration generated by having to deal with Golang.
- bartread 9y ago
  I'm not sure what the downvoting is for. There are verifiably a bunch of people on HN, granted probably a vocal minority, who slag Google off for a variety of reasons (plenty valid, no doubt). The author of the article doesn't mention Google, but that's not what my comment was about: it was a (very mild) observation that there are some people, and I'm sure by no means the majority nor anywhere close, who will neg on Google and their tech, because they don't like Google.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
tonyjstark 9y ago
I would agree, but then, the author names reasons to dislike Go (even if we all heard them before), does not say anything about Google and is not even exceptionally vulgar about it. So after reading about golang over and over, it seems it is going the MongoDB way. A lot of excitement at the start because it's easy and fast to put something out but as soon as maintenance mode needs to kick in, people realize it is not the silver bullet and maybe not even a ok solution. But isn't that a problem of the whole industry? First a hype gets build up and a lot of people jump on the band wagon. Then the real world kicks in and some complain overly loud and others chime in with "I told you so". Finally a lot of people change the tech stack silently because nobody likes to talk about their failures too much. I can't say if it is the same with golang, I did not use it at all yet, but some design decisions are at least doubtful.
stouset 9y ago
People are downvoting you for claiming that the dislike of Go is primarily due to anti-Google bias as opposed to actual technical concerns about the language, which preemptively discounts the opinions of these people without having to address any of the points they raise.

kmicklas 9y ago

Nah I worked at Google and even there most engineers didn't like Go.

stouset 9y ago

Or maybe it’s because we’ve tried golang repeatedly, been frustrated the entire way, and are desperately hoping that someone will help us understand what people actually see in the language. I work and live in SF. Of people I talk to in real life who’ve used golang for non-Google, non-toy projects, sentiment is at least 4-to-1 against it, and in my anecdata that ratio generally increases as people use it for longer. The one consistent praise I’ve heard that seems genuine (and that I don’t entirely disagree with) is that it’s easy for a new team member to jump on board and be productive. Which sounds great, but if this is what you’re optimizing for at (in my opinion) the expense of nearly everything else, then it seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy of high turnover.

matt_m 9y ago
Sure, I think I can explain some of what people might see in it. Obviously its strengths/weaknesses will depend on what language you compare it to, the article mentioned Java so I'll use that. 1) Value types - in Java if you want an array of objects of a non-primitive type, each one will be individually heap allocated (with some extra per-object overhead) and stored as an array of pointers (may change in Java 10). Go allows objects to be linear in memory with no overhead. 2) Slices everywhere - in Go slices are the default list representation. This allows any API that takes a list of objects to be passed a range of a bigger list, without copying/allocating. 3) Low-latency garbage collector - I believe Go has one of the lowest latency garbage collectors in common use (sub-1ms pauses). I realize Java has several options, but I think Go's is lower latency than all but some commercial/exotic ones like Zing. This is not saying the GC is better all around, just on latency. It's also relatively easy to minimize allocations in Go due to value types. 4) Low-overhead concurrency - lightweight tasks with no blocking/non-blocking dichotomy in APIs. But threads can scale up a lot, so this might not be a big benefit depending on the application. 5) Interior pointers - you can lay out structures linearly, and still use interior pointers. Also, you can use them as interfaces without allocating any 'boxed' objects. There's probably more, but these are the things that come to mind right now. Looking back on this list, all of them are performance related. So if an application isn't performance sensitive in any of these ways I guess it would be understandable that someone might not see much in it, compared to a language with a higher learning curve but a lot of conveniences like Kotlin. Things like capitalization don't seem that big an issue though... maybe because Go is a simple language the tooling is already pretty good, and you can easily rename to upper/lower case in an IDE like GoLand. For people unfamiliar with Go and want to see something more than hello world, I think an interesting project to look at is https://github.com/fogleman/pt https://github.com/fogleman/pt. It's not enormous but not trivial either and makes use of interfaces, goroutines etc. The author's other projects are great too.

eropple 9y ago

I think that's an uncharitable explanation. I'm very happy using the Google services I do and I pay them for my personal domain/email (have for the last decade or so). I think Kubernetes is a great idea and I run it in production. But it would be difficult to find a job that would pay me enough to deal with the frustration generated by having to deal with Golang.

bartread 9y ago
I'm not sure what the downvoting is for. There are verifiably a bunch of people on HN, granted probably a vocal minority, who slag Google off for a variety of reasons (plenty valid, no doubt). The author of the article doesn't mention Google, but that's not what my comment was about: it was a (very mild) observation that there are some people, and I'm sure by no means the majority nor anywhere close, who will neg on Google and their tech, because they don't like Google.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

tonyjstark 9y ago

I would agree, but then, the author names reasons to dislike Go (even if we all heard them before), does not say anything about Google and is not even exceptionally vulgar about it. So after reading about golang over and over, it seems it is going the MongoDB way. A lot of excitement at the start because it's easy and fast to put something out but as soon as maintenance mode needs to kick in, people realize it is not the silver bullet and maybe not even a ok solution. But isn't that a problem of the whole industry? First a hype gets build up and a lot of people jump on the band wagon. Then the real world kicks in and some complain overly loud and others chime in with "I told you so". Finally a lot of people change the tech stack silently because nobody likes to talk about their failures too much. I can't say if it is the same with golang, I did not use it at all yet, but some design decisions are at least doubtful.

stouset 9y ago

People are downvoting you for claiming that the dislike of Go is primarily due to anti-Google bias as opposed to actual technical concerns about the language, which preemptively discounts the opinions of these people without having to address any of the points they raise.