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This touches on a difference between the Go and Scala communities and courses from my very brief experience learning scala for work the past couple months. The

This touches on a difference between the Go and Scala communities and courses from my very brief experience learning scala for work the past couple months. The older I get the more I want things that are explicit and easy to understand. Tons of sites and videos and blogs exist that break down the features of Go without a ton of math lingo. I never see Scala materials free of that. Even when I agree that I need to understand the terms of art I haven’t been in a math class in 16 years and it’s slow going. With Go I was productive in two days and proficient in less than two weeks. Yes I still shoot myself in the foot with channels and race conditions when I’m rushing but at least it’s a super fast compile cycle to iterate and my IDE doesn’t require over 2gb ram like scala / idea does.

yahyaheee 7y ago
Yup being easy to understand without lacking functionality is definitely superior to supporting every insane programming concept. It builds stronger communities and better software
- jkachmar 7y ago
  Big ol’ “Citation Needed” on this one. The flip-side here is that a language that doesn’t support basic programming language theory concepts dooms its users to repeat the mistakes of those who discovered them. I also would personally disagree that any statically types language without generic types and without non-nullability (e.g. `Option`/`Maybe` and `Result`/`Either`) is severely lacking in the ability to express programs that are easy to understand.
  - yahyaheee 7y ago
    proof is in the pudding on that one, sorry don't think there are academics studying this but it's an obvious outcome from the war that was Go/Scala/Node. Go is eating Scalas lunch because its easy to understand and communities are stronger than individuals. Sure Scala has more 'features' but Rob Pike would say every feature has a cost and you need to weigh that, didn't see that ever happen in Scala. Go is taking the time to get each piece right and I'm glad for it.
    - MiroF 7y ago
      Adoption isn't everything and google has incredible marketing sway. Tensorflow almost won the ML framework wars despite being clearly outclassed by Torch and it took until recently for Torch to overcome the Google brand name
      - yahyaheee 7y ago
        Marketing and they understand how to build communities, this is actually the most important thing. TF isn't a great product so thats showing through now, Go and K8s are and you don't see the backtick there.
    - jkachmar 7y ago
      Another commenter points out that Go has Google backing it, which is a significant confounding factor in terms of figuring out how good it is on its own merits. I’ll add to this and say that Go is a language that is very well-suited for Google’s issues. Namely, take a bunch of engineers with a particular area of familiarity (e.g. familiarity with C and/or Java) and throw them at code, scaling up by number-of-engineers where necessary. My issue with pointing to this and calling it “practical” and “easy to understand” is twofold: (1) Go implicitly makes its ease of understanding dependent on an having existing background knowledge of concepts that the HN crowd is likely to have, themselves, which biases people but isn’t particularly easy to learn on its own merits (versus, say, Python) (2) Most companies cannot afford to solve engineering problems by throwing more bodies at it, but with Go your option is either that or leveraging external code generation As far as “taking the time to get each piece right”, this stuff isn’t cutting edge technology development! Go isn’t doing dependent typing or borrow checking or scoped effects! Everything that people lambast the language over not having is old hat, it’s like defending a car manufacturer who chose to use carburetors over fuel injection by saying that they’re trying to figure out how to do it right.
      - yahyaheee 7y ago
        Sorry those just aren't legitimate analogies. As I mention before every feature has a cost, Go is highly concerned with how those costs impact the community. In doing so they have created a language thats highly maintainable and efficient. Even at small companies there is turnover and you being 'really smart' with some abstraction has an impact, I've seen this plenty first hand.

yahyaheee 7y ago

Yup being easy to understand without lacking functionality is definitely superior to supporting every insane programming concept. It builds stronger communities and better software

jkachmar 7y ago
Big ol’ “Citation Needed” on this one. The flip-side here is that a language that doesn’t support basic programming language theory concepts dooms its users to repeat the mistakes of those who discovered them. I also would personally disagree that any statically types language without generic types and without non-nullability (e.g. `Option`/`Maybe` and `Result`/`Either`) is severely lacking in the ability to express programs that are easy to understand.
- yahyaheee 7y ago
  proof is in the pudding on that one, sorry don't think there are academics studying this but it's an obvious outcome from the war that was Go/Scala/Node. Go is eating Scalas lunch because its easy to understand and communities are stronger than individuals. Sure Scala has more 'features' but Rob Pike would say every feature has a cost and you need to weigh that, didn't see that ever happen in Scala. Go is taking the time to get each piece right and I'm glad for it.
  - MiroF 7y ago
    Adoption isn't everything and google has incredible marketing sway. Tensorflow almost won the ML framework wars despite being clearly outclassed by Torch and it took until recently for Torch to overcome the Google brand name
    - yahyaheee 7y ago
      Marketing and they understand how to build communities, this is actually the most important thing. TF isn't a great product so thats showing through now, Go and K8s are and you don't see the backtick there.
  - jkachmar 7y ago
    Another commenter points out that Go has Google backing it, which is a significant confounding factor in terms of figuring out how good it is on its own merits. I’ll add to this and say that Go is a language that is very well-suited for Google’s issues. Namely, take a bunch of engineers with a particular area of familiarity (e.g. familiarity with C and/or Java) and throw them at code, scaling up by number-of-engineers where necessary. My issue with pointing to this and calling it “practical” and “easy to understand” is twofold: (1) Go implicitly makes its ease of understanding dependent on an having existing background knowledge of concepts that the HN crowd is likely to have, themselves, which biases people but isn’t particularly easy to learn on its own merits (versus, say, Python) (2) Most companies cannot afford to solve engineering problems by throwing more bodies at it, but with Go your option is either that or leveraging external code generation As far as “taking the time to get each piece right”, this stuff isn’t cutting edge technology development! Go isn’t doing dependent typing or borrow checking or scoped effects! Everything that people lambast the language over not having is old hat, it’s like defending a car manufacturer who chose to use carburetors over fuel injection by saying that they’re trying to figure out how to do it right.
    - yahyaheee 7y ago
      Sorry those just aren't legitimate analogies. As I mention before every feature has a cost, Go is highly concerned with how those costs impact the community. In doing so they have created a language thats highly maintainable and efficient. Even at small companies there is turnover and you being 'really smart' with some abstraction has an impact, I've seen this plenty first hand.