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Go Developer Survey 2020 Results

74 points by radimm 6y ago

rhabarba 6y ago
While you read that blog entry, please especially enjoy the different bar lengths for identical percentages. One would guess that the SVGs were generated with Go. /s
- heliostatic 6y ago
  Wow, I thought your comment was hyperbolic and then read the article. Not sure how those charts made it to production.
  - rhabarba 6y ago
    You first read the comments, then the article? Classy.
    - topspin 6y ago
      Clickbait avoidance tactic. Entirely valid these days.
    - NomDePlum 6y ago
      I only read articles if the comments merit it. I've learned 100 times more from the comments I'd say. I'd guess I read 10 comment threads to ever linked article. The articles are a semi-random selection of what is on the internet. The comments are from the HN community, which by being part of, is almost self-selecting interesting and stimulating content for yourself.
- enneff 6y ago
  At a guess I’d say the displayed numbers are rounded while the bars are rendered using the actual numbers.
- tux3 6y ago
  It seems like the percentages are displayed rounded to the nearest int, and the bars show full precision. That seems completely fine to me, really.
  - rhabarba 6y ago
    Probably, not obvious though. In this case, my sarcastic comment was probably too superficial.
- dwiner 6y ago
  Probably due to the percentage labels being rounded to whole numbers.
- monocasa 6y ago
  There's probably more precision in the numbers that was cut off for readability. 12.05% vs 12.47% kinda thing.
AlchemistCamp 6y ago
The most surprising part to me was that go devs are feeling less and less welcome in "the community" and less and less welcome to contribute. I wonder why that is.
- axaxs 6y ago
  For me at least, it's because the size of both the community and the official team expanded hugely in the last few years. I don't feel like they need or want outside help anymore.
- taklimakan 6y ago
  This is probably a rhetorical question, anyway if the feeling of being less welcomed comes from how likely the devs are to accept random or poorly thought-out proposals, I don’t think there’s any problem at all. I say, do not welcome them! The core Go team is made of extremely competent and professional engineers, and I expect successful language change proposals or pull requests to be on par with that. Otherwise what are we even talking about?
  - rhabarba 6y ago
    I’d wish more technical projects would focus on competent and professional engineers again. Instead, we see calls for more diversity everywhere, including this very survey. I wonder what would be the advantage of having people from different ethnical backgrounds over having people from different tech backgrounds...
    - rudi-c 6y ago
      The idea of focusing diversity isn't at odds with focusing on competence. The premise is that certain groups of people who do not fit the stereotype of a male, nerdy, white or asian programmer are often assumed to be less technically competent because of their appearance. As an Asian male, I can't tell you how often people assume I'm smart just by appearance alone. This leads to a hiring process that does _worse_ at hiring component engineers. Even if they are hired, the company culture might not be inclusive enough to retain them - e.g. lots of women leave the industry for that reason. This also leads to a _loss_ of talent. It's true that some companies might do diversity poorly and hire solely to hit diversity numbers. I don't personally feel good about that. However, in practice I've seen companies that focus on diversity adopt the practice of putting more effort into reaching out to diverse candidates, but have the exact same hiring process & hiring bar applied to them. Those reasonable companies don't make the news -- after all, the unreasonable stories tend to be the ones that get attention. Again, it's not to say that your concern never happens. However, framing diversity as if it was fundamentally at odds with competence, especially in a completely unrelated thread about a programming language, does a disservice to both diversity _and_ competence.
withinboredom 6y ago
I wonder if/how they measure survivorship bias. They mentioned it was about the same number of responses, were they all the same people?
BillFranklin 6y ago
It's interesting that 17% are not satisfied with editor support for Go. The biggest editor feature requests were for code completion and navigating code. Rather than editors being at fault, could these indicate that Go is a bit too verbose? I wonder if generic functions will affect this. I rarely write Go, but I can imagine autocompletion macros for `err != ...` could help.
- Demigod33 6y ago
  > It's interesting that 17% are not satisfied with editor support for Go. GoLand does a better job and is more stable and reliable than VSCode here, even having to restart the daemon from time to time for VSCode. Of course it could also be what you said, I can only write for myself. I hope they will be able to introduce stability and reliability of the former.
  - PaulKeeble 6y ago
    I have had issues with the recent go plugin for VSCode too. The new version is unreliable and the language server needs a reboot fairly often. It is a real pain because when it breaks it often shows a compile error that you end up scratching your head over and a simple restart of the editor will often fix it. It definitely wastes time and needs addressing soon.
- rhabarba 6y ago
  Wasn’t one of the points of LSP to make editors exchangeable?
  - eikenberry 6y ago
    Editors support for LSP is still uneven as it is still a very young "standard".
- xienze 6y ago
  > Rather than editors being at fault, could these indicate that Go is a bit too verbose? No, I think it’s just that the Go language server, last I used it, had lots of trouble dealing with completion for code that lives in another module. GoLand did much better in this regard, but I suspect it’s not used nearly as much as VSCode, hence the response.
PaulKeeble 6y ago
Desktop Applications 8%. There is a reason for that, the GUI frameworks up until recently have been quite poor. I had been using Lorca as a Chrome wrapper that gave me a HTML interface but alas some users ran into weird bugs with it, its just not reliable and webview which utilises the native browser (edge/GTK/Safari) is even less reliable. I have been trying out Fyne recently and that seems stable and functional all be it with the same issues that Swing has with Java but also the same benefits. Go could do with a decent GUI framework, I think a lot of people would like something that isn't Visual Studio C#/C++ for this purpose but its not Go (or rust) at this point.
- rhabarba 6y ago
  WALK is fine, but it is Windows-only.
closeparen 6y ago
All I want for Christmas is a way to get decent test coverage on a method with several “if err != nil { return err }” branches that isn’t excruciating.
- abledon 6y ago
  i want an unused variable to exist in my fireplace config stocking
nemothekid 6y ago
I’m surprised nsq didn’t make the list for Golang pipelines. It was one of the first big go projects I can remember
TobySKT 6y ago
We are lucky to witness a transformation of healthcare approach – “patients go after hospitals” concept has been shifting to “healthcare providers follow patients”. This is absolutely normal, as healthcare becomes more and more patient-centered. This post, actually, was written to let those healthcare providers, who are hesitating whether or not to purchase, or order development of, a dedicated CRM solution, that it is not something extremely difficult and that building a healthcare CRM software can substantially benefit both parties – medical institution and its patients https://steelkiwi.com/blog/building-a-custom-healthcare-crm-system/ https://steelkiwi.com/blog/building-a-custom-healthcare-crm-...
stunt 6y ago
> 66% said Go is critical for the success of their company That's way more than what I could guess!
stunt 6y ago
> The most common area by far was web development (68%) 68% is a lot and I hope it lead to have more mature web libraries in the future. I'm comparing it to other languages Java(e.g. Spring), PHP(e.g. Laravel & Symfony), Ruby(e.g. Rails), NodeJS(e.g. NestJS & NextJS) and I think Go community has a long way to go. We had a discussion recently about building an internal web app and I had no chance to even defend Spring against Laravel yet alone Golang (My current team mainly uses Spring). It's just crazy how much scaffolding they have in place for web development. You get clean authentication with email verification and 2FA, and profile, team and roles management running in 5 minutes. And their collection library has most if not all of the Java Stream features. Then you spend another 5 minutes to add a scaffolding for building administration panels. And they are together just 3 months of development work if you ask me. So as much as I love the idea of building your own stuff, I can't defend it when it comes to raw components for web development like authentication and admins panels.
alexkarbiv 6y ago
Go is good. Based on decades long research and experiments of Rob Pike and others. It's interesting to read comments by employees of american corporations that act like members of a national-socialist organization(of workers). There are people from Europe(not western) that became almost suicidal after working in those environments in US. Main principles of some organizations are pathological lying and suppression of free speech in any forms. That banner is like a test of obedience. Anyone who questions it - is problematic, "toxic". It doesn't matter what that banner contains. Obey. "They Live" movie.(1988, John Carpenter)

74 points by radimm 6y ago

While you read that blog entry, please especially enjoy the different bar lengths for identical percentages. One would guess that the SVGs were generated with Go. /s

heliostatic 6y ago
Wow, I thought your comment was hyperbolic and then read the article. Not sure how those charts made it to production.
- rhabarba 6y ago
  You first read the comments, then the article? Classy.
  - topspin 6y ago
    Clickbait avoidance tactic. Entirely valid these days.
  - NomDePlum 6y ago
    I only read articles if the comments merit it. I've learned 100 times more from the comments I'd say. I'd guess I read 10 comment threads to ever linked article. The articles are a semi-random selection of what is on the internet. The comments are from the HN community, which by being part of, is almost self-selecting interesting and stimulating content for yourself.
enneff 6y ago
At a guess I’d say the displayed numbers are rounded while the bars are rendered using the actual numbers.
tux3 6y ago
It seems like the percentages are displayed rounded to the nearest int, and the bars show full precision. That seems completely fine to me, really.
- rhabarba 6y ago
  Probably, not obvious though. In this case, my sarcastic comment was probably too superficial.
dwiner 6y ago
Probably due to the percentage labels being rounded to whole numbers.
monocasa 6y ago
There's probably more precision in the numbers that was cut off for readability. 12.05% vs 12.47% kinda thing.

AlchemistCamp 6y ago

The most surprising part to me was that go devs are feeling less and less welcome in "the community" and less and less welcome to contribute. I wonder why that is.

axaxs 6y ago
For me at least, it's because the size of both the community and the official team expanded hugely in the last few years. I don't feel like they need or want outside help anymore.
taklimakan 6y ago
This is probably a rhetorical question, anyway if the feeling of being less welcomed comes from how likely the devs are to accept random or poorly thought-out proposals, I don’t think there’s any problem at all. I say, do not welcome them! The core Go team is made of extremely competent and professional engineers, and I expect successful language change proposals or pull requests to be on par with that. Otherwise what are we even talking about?
- rhabarba 6y ago
  I’d wish more technical projects would focus on competent and professional engineers again. Instead, we see calls for more diversity everywhere, including this very survey. I wonder what would be the advantage of having people from different ethnical backgrounds over having people from different tech backgrounds...
  - rudi-c 6y ago
    The idea of focusing diversity isn't at odds with focusing on competence. The premise is that certain groups of people who do not fit the stereotype of a male, nerdy, white or asian programmer are often assumed to be less technically competent because of their appearance. As an Asian male, I can't tell you how often people assume I'm smart just by appearance alone. This leads to a hiring process that does _worse_ at hiring component engineers. Even if they are hired, the company culture might not be inclusive enough to retain them - e.g. lots of women leave the industry for that reason. This also leads to a _loss_ of talent. It's true that some companies might do diversity poorly and hire solely to hit diversity numbers. I don't personally feel good about that. However, in practice I've seen companies that focus on diversity adopt the practice of putting more effort into reaching out to diverse candidates, but have the exact same hiring process & hiring bar applied to them. Those reasonable companies don't make the news -- after all, the unreasonable stories tend to be the ones that get attention. Again, it's not to say that your concern never happens. However, framing diversity as if it was fundamentally at odds with competence, especially in a completely unrelated thread about a programming language, does a disservice to both diversity _and_ competence.

withinboredom 6y ago

I wonder if/how they measure survivorship bias. They mentioned it was about the same number of responses, were they all the same people?

BillFranklin 6y ago

It's interesting that 17% are not satisfied with editor support for Go. The biggest editor feature requests were for code completion and navigating code. Rather than editors being at fault, could these indicate that Go is a bit too verbose? I wonder if generic functions will affect this. I rarely write Go, but I can imagine autocompletion macros for `err != ...` could help.

Demigod33 6y ago
> It's interesting that 17% are not satisfied with editor support for Go. GoLand does a better job and is more stable and reliable than VSCode here, even having to restart the daemon from time to time for VSCode. Of course it could also be what you said, I can only write for myself. I hope they will be able to introduce stability and reliability of the former.
- PaulKeeble 6y ago
  I have had issues with the recent go plugin for VSCode too. The new version is unreliable and the language server needs a reboot fairly often. It is a real pain because when it breaks it often shows a compile error that you end up scratching your head over and a simple restart of the editor will often fix it. It definitely wastes time and needs addressing soon.
rhabarba 6y ago
Wasn’t one of the points of LSP to make editors exchangeable?
- eikenberry 6y ago
  Editors support for LSP is still uneven as it is still a very young "standard".
xienze 6y ago
> Rather than editors being at fault, could these indicate that Go is a bit too verbose? No, I think it’s just that the Go language server, last I used it, had lots of trouble dealing with completion for code that lives in another module. GoLand did much better in this regard, but I suspect it’s not used nearly as much as VSCode, hence the response.

PaulKeeble 6y ago

Desktop Applications 8%. There is a reason for that, the GUI frameworks up until recently have been quite poor. I had been using Lorca as a Chrome wrapper that gave me a HTML interface but alas some users ran into weird bugs with it, its just not reliable and webview which utilises the native browser (edge/GTK/Safari) is even less reliable. I have been trying out Fyne recently and that seems stable and functional all be it with the same issues that Swing has with Java but also the same benefits. Go could do with a decent GUI framework, I think a lot of people would like something that isn't Visual Studio C#/C++ for this purpose but its not Go (or rust) at this point.

rhabarba 6y ago
WALK is fine, but it is Windows-only.

closeparen 6y ago

All I want for Christmas is a way to get decent test coverage on a method with several “if err != nil { return err }” branches that isn’t excruciating.

abledon 6y ago
i want an unused variable to exist in my fireplace config stocking

nemothekid 6y ago

I’m surprised nsq didn’t make the list for Golang pipelines. It was one of the first big go projects I can remember

TobySKT 6y ago

We are lucky to witness a transformation of healthcare approach – “patients go after hospitals” concept has been shifting to “healthcare providers follow patients”. This is absolutely normal, as healthcare becomes more and more patient-centered. This post, actually, was written to let those healthcare providers, who are hesitating whether or not to purchase, or order development of, a dedicated CRM solution, that it is not something extremely difficult and that building a healthcare CRM software can substantially benefit both parties – medical institution and its patients https://steelkiwi.com/blog/building-a-custom-healthcare-crm-system/ https://steelkiwi.com/blog/building-a-custom-healthcare-crm-...

stunt 6y ago

> 66% said Go is critical for the success of their company That's way more than what I could guess!

stunt 6y ago

> The most common area by far was web development (68%) 68% is a lot and I hope it lead to have more mature web libraries in the future. I'm comparing it to other languages Java(e.g. Spring), PHP(e.g. Laravel & Symfony), Ruby(e.g. Rails), NodeJS(e.g. NestJS & NextJS) and I think Go community has a long way to go. We had a discussion recently about building an internal web app and I had no chance to even defend Spring against Laravel yet alone Golang (My current team mainly uses Spring). It's just crazy how much scaffolding they have in place for web development. You get clean authentication with email verification and 2FA, and profile, team and roles management running in 5 minutes. And their collection library has most if not all of the Java Stream features. Then you spend another 5 minutes to add a scaffolding for building administration panels. And they are together just 3 months of development work if you ask me. So as much as I love the idea of building your own stuff, I can't defend it when it comes to raw components for web development like authentication and admins panels.

alexkarbiv 6y ago

Go is good. Based on decades long research and experiments of Rob Pike and others. It's interesting to read comments by employees of american corporations that act like members of a national-socialist organization(of workers). There are people from Europe(not western) that became almost suicidal after working in those environments in US. Main principles of some organizations are pathological lying and suppression of free speech in any forms. That banner is like a test of obedience. Anyone who questions it - is problematic, "toxic". It doesn't matter what that banner contains. Obey. "They Live" movie.(1988, John Carpenter)