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Both Red Monk and TIOBE [1] are noting a decrease in the popularity of Go. Red Monk wondered aloud if this had to do with the way the Go modules / dep situation

by mfer 7y ago

Both Red Monk and TIOBE [1] are noting a decrease in the popularity of Go. Red Monk wondered aloud if this had to do with the way the Go modules / dep situation happened [2]. I wonder if the posts lately are an attempt to win people over to their thinking or to win back popularity. [1] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/go/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/go/ [2] https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2019/07/18/language-rankings-6-19/ https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2019/07/18/language-rankings-6-1...

dilap 7y ago
Yeah, I'm a Go fan, and I think modules/minimum-version-control seems like a good idea, but the implementation was handled poorly -- it broke tons of tools, and things still aren't fully working, which is insane. For a language whose appeal rests in large part on "shit just works," it's defnly been a bummer. (Maybe it's actually not something that could've been done better; maybe it's just the nature of the magnitude of the change. In which case I think the mistake was going "1.0" when you knew you had something so important not yet defined.)
- mfer 7y ago
  There are many cases MVS and updated don’t work for. For example, if you have a dependency on a package inside kubernetes because it doesn’t follow semver. You can’t pin to minor updates and use ‘go get -u’ Control has been taken away from package consumers
jerf 7y ago
Tiobe fluctuates wildly, and it isn't really plausible that it plummeted as far as it did on Tiobe in just one month. The chatter on HN will tend to amplify problems beyond what the general public actually feels the correct level is, and even on HN this hasn't exactly been a big topic. (When generic Go topics discuss "what's wrong with Go" this is not generally something that is mentioned.) It seems far more likely that, yet again (this isn't exactly a new thing with Tiobe), the search engines did "something" and the searches changed again. Many, if not most, of the programming language names are susceptible to that, between things that are too short to search for like C and terms of general interest like Python, but Go really has to be the worst. Ten-year-old+ programming languages with at the very least tens of thousands of users (I see "millions" claimed, I find myself a bit skeptical, but maybe... conservatively tens of thousands for sure, though) do not lose 33% of their users in a month. That'd be somewhere in 2-3 orders of magnitude faster than Perl 5 has declined. Implausible.
- mfer 7y ago
  TIOBE notes that it is looking at popularity. This is different than use. Go didn't loose a bunch of users. In the ways TIOBE measures popularity... it lost some popularity.
  - jerf 7y ago
    It did not lose one third of its "popularity" in a month, either. You're putting a "just so" story on top of noise. Nor is this special pleading on my part; "Tiobe is mostly noise" has been my position for years, along with a lot of other people. Signal probably exceeds noise for maybe the first 3 or 4 or maybe 5 slots, after that it has a history demonstrably absurd claims about the popularity of things like REXX, which spent many years in the so-called "top 20", which is just ridiculous.

by mfer 7y ago

dilap 7y ago

Yeah, I'm a Go fan, and I think modules/minimum-version-control seems like a good idea, but the implementation was handled poorly -- it broke tons of tools, and things still aren't fully working, which is insane. For a language whose appeal rests in large part on "shit just works," it's defnly been a bummer. (Maybe it's actually not something that could've been done better; maybe it's just the nature of the magnitude of the change. In which case I think the mistake was going "1.0" when you knew you had something so important not yet defined.)

mfer 7y ago
There are many cases MVS and updated don’t work for. For example, if you have a dependency on a package inside kubernetes because it doesn’t follow semver. You can’t pin to minor updates and use ‘go get -u’ Control has been taken away from package consumers

jerf 7y ago

Tiobe fluctuates wildly, and it isn't really plausible that it plummeted as far as it did on Tiobe in just one month. The chatter on HN will tend to amplify problems beyond what the general public actually feels the correct level is, and even on HN this hasn't exactly been a big topic. (When generic Go topics discuss "what's wrong with Go" this is not generally something that is mentioned.) It seems far more likely that, yet again (this isn't exactly a new thing with Tiobe), the search engines did "something" and the searches changed again. Many, if not most, of the programming language names are susceptible to that, between things that are too short to search for like C and terms of general interest like Python, but Go really has to be the worst. Ten-year-old+ programming languages with at the very least tens of thousands of users (I see "millions" claimed, I find myself a bit skeptical, but maybe... conservatively tens of thousands for sure, though) do not lose 33% of their users in a month. That'd be somewhere in 2-3 orders of magnitude faster than Perl 5 has declined. Implausible.

mfer 7y ago
TIOBE notes that it is looking at popularity. This is different than use. Go didn't loose a bunch of users. In the ways TIOBE measures popularity... it lost some popularity.
- jerf 7y ago
  It did not lose one third of its "popularity" in a month, either. You're putting a "just so" story on top of noise. Nor is this special pleading on my part; "Tiobe is mostly noise" has been my position for years, along with a lot of other people. Signal probably exceeds noise for maybe the first 3 or 4 or maybe 5 slots, after that it has a history demonstrably absurd claims about the popularity of things like REXX, which spent many years in the so-called "top 20", which is just ridiculous.