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It looks like it has become fashionable to write Go related posts as they sure get the attention on HN :-). I don't use Go, but all these posts remind me of wha

It looks like it has become fashionable to write Go related posts as they sure get the attention on HN :-). I don't use Go, but all these posts remind me of what Bjarne Stroustroup said [1] about C++: “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.” [1]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/226225-there-are-only-two-kinds-of-languages-the-ones-people https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/226225-there-are-only-two-k...

cy_hauser 6y ago
>> It looks like it has become fashionable to write Go related posts as they sure get the attention on HN No, not really. I filter for Go, Rust, Nim, and Dart on HN. Rust is the most popular with at least a post every day or two and Go about half that time or less. There used to be way more Go articles in past years. Some of the recent Go posts have gotten traction so maybe you're seeing that.
- DiggyJohnson 6y ago
  >> it has become fashionable > no not really This doesn’t make sense to me at all. 50% as popular as Rust is considerably fashionable. I imagine that Rust is one of the most common programming languages to appear in post titles on HN.
CraigJPerry 6y ago
I kind of wish people would make more posts about c++ - idiomatic c++ today is totally different than the c++ knowledge i have from pre-2010. The fact that c++ has changed so much in the past 10 years - it’s possible to write completely type and resource safe code in c++ now - this passed me by until a year or two ago when i attended a Bjarne talk. Also the c++ folks have written up a core guidelines doc (this was the main topic of that Bjarne talk), and it’s really good https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines/blob/master/CppCoreGuidelines.md https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines/blob/master/CppC...
- pjmlp 6y ago
  The problem is that there is even a counter movement to it, praising C with Classes kind of code, Orthodox C++.
- dgellow 6y ago
  You may want to follow the C++ subreddit, people are actually writing quite a lot about modern C++, it's just difficult to find out articles because the C++ community is completely decentralized and has no official (or even semi-official) forum. People write on their own blog and it requires some work to discover and aggregate all that content. https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/ I also really enjoy listening to the CppCast podcast by Rob Irving and Jason Turner, it's a nice way to follow what is happening with the language: https://cppcast.com/ https://cppcast.com/.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    CppCast is great, most of the content is quite good and is a very good way for those of us that mostly work with other languages to still keep up with C++ progress.
  - cbfields21 6y ago
    It is strange that there's no official mailing list (except the defunct comp.lang.c++). I recently wondered where one could find new C++ software since there's no announce list at all.
    - dgellow 6y ago
      The German-speaking community has an unofficial forum: https://www.c-plusplus.net/forum/ https://www.c-plusplus.net/forum/
    - bregma 6y ago
      There is also no central authority other than a committee of decentralized interests that meet a couple of times a year to figure out how to keep their published document up to date. One of the tricks with C++ is that it isn't a product created ex cathedra by a single interest group with a focused purpose and provided for you like mother's milk; it's a generalized idea that emerged from a bazaar of interests and provided by a free market for whatever purpose you chose. It has evolved to fill a niche rather than be designed to reach a particular goal (eg. 'kill C++') or even designed to reach a vague goal ('fix all the problems with C'). There is no official mailing list because there is no official 'there' there. C++ is not an organization, or a corporation, or a guy in his mom's basement. It's an idea held (mostly somewhat) in common by a whole lot of people with otherwise no shared interests all over the world.
nonoesp 6y ago
I love Go and I think many people use - it works great in production environments and it's cross-platform by default. Are you insinuating it's not a widely-used language? Without going too far, Docker is written in Go.
- ashishmax31 6y ago
  I learned Go as my first statically typed language(Worked on ruby and some python before that). Although I missed the functional goodies from Ruby in Go, I thought that was the price I had to pay for performance and static checking guarantees.. Nevertheless, I enjoyed writing Go and its take on writing concurrent programs. As others have called it, I thought of Go as "modern C with garbage collection and first class concurrency primitives". All this changed when I started learning Rust, man was I blown away by the language.. I never thought a statically typed language with manual memory management can feel so "scripting language" like.(Sure the borrow checker annoys you sometimes, nothing a `.clone()` can't fix when you are starting out). I truly enjoy writing Rust these days and never have I missed anything major from Ruby. I'll be damned if I sit here and criticize Ken Thompson and Rob Pike, but I feel like in their quest to make Go "simple" they've perhaps held a little too hard on to their past. tldr; Go feels a little too verbose and "dated" after learning rust.
  - totalperspectiv 6y ago
    I had this exact same progression, but with Python instead of Ruby. Go was a great intro to statically typed langurs though, I’d take go over JVM any day. Currently love Rust, but Crystal, Nim, and Swift are all rather distracting. Once Go gets generics I’ll be interested in giving it a second look.
geocar 6y ago
> “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.” Some of those languages that nobody uses, are really good, though. Programmers that learn them hit well above their weight-class in individual-productivity, and if they're lucky they get to support applications written in "dead" languages for fat stacks. Oh and they're often fun too -- who doesn't want to have fun for the 1/3rd of their life that we're supposed to be working? I think I understand that some people want to be popular more than they want to be good, but what I find really weird is the people who would rather be close to popular instead of close to good. What's the point?
- kaba0 6y ago
  While I also recommend checking out niche languages, the language is only one part. The platform, ecosystem is often much more important, and even in a really great PL, you won’t get an order of magnitude productivity boost over a modern high level language. But of course, having fun is really important.
- preommr 6y ago
  > Some of those languages that nobody uses, are really good, though. Such as?
zxcvbn4038 6y ago
It seems these articles appear every week now. This should be a solved problem - if you don’t like coding in Go then don’t code in Go. Simple. There is no point of writing a thirty page manifesto of everything you hate about Go. Put that effort into learning python, ruby, nodejs, or whatever floats your boat. If your tempted to write manifestos for those languages also then maybe consider a different line of work.
- skywhopper 6y ago
  This article is not complaining about Go. It’s pointing out the gotchas, which every language has. IMO it reads like it was written by someone who likes Go quite a bit, or at least is as pragmatic about Go as Go is.
  - cratermoon 6y ago
    My favorite books about languages are the ones that point out where the language is ambiguous or otherwise has surprising, e.g C Traps and Pitfalls and Java Puzzlers: Traps, Pitfalls, and Corner Cases, . It would be great if there were programming languages with no surprises, but I don't think that it's possible. Every language has to compromise on some things in order to solve the problems it was designed for.
joelfolksy 6y ago
What a great quote. Next time my wife criticizes me, I'm going to say, "Babe, there are only two kinds of men: the ones their spouses complain about and the ones that aren't married." I'll never have to take out the trash again!

cy_hauser 6y ago

>> It looks like it has become fashionable to write Go related posts as they sure get the attention on HN No, not really. I filter for Go, Rust, Nim, and Dart on HN. Rust is the most popular with at least a post every day or two and Go about half that time or less. There used to be way more Go articles in past years. Some of the recent Go posts have gotten traction so maybe you're seeing that.

DiggyJohnson 6y ago
>> it has become fashionable > no not really This doesn’t make sense to me at all. 50% as popular as Rust is considerably fashionable. I imagine that Rust is one of the most common programming languages to appear in post titles on HN.

CraigJPerry 6y ago

I kind of wish people would make more posts about c++ - idiomatic c++ today is totally different than the c++ knowledge i have from pre-2010. The fact that c++ has changed so much in the past 10 years - it’s possible to write completely type and resource safe code in c++ now - this passed me by until a year or two ago when i attended a Bjarne talk. Also the c++ folks have written up a core guidelines doc (this was the main topic of that Bjarne talk), and it’s really good https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines/blob/master/CppCoreGuidelines.md https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines/blob/master/CppC...

pjmlp 6y ago
The problem is that there is even a counter movement to it, praising C with Classes kind of code, Orthodox C++.
dgellow 6y ago
You may want to follow the C++ subreddit, people are actually writing quite a lot about modern C++, it's just difficult to find out articles because the C++ community is completely decentralized and has no official (or even semi-official) forum. People write on their own blog and it requires some work to discover and aggregate all that content. https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/ I also really enjoy listening to the CppCast podcast by Rob Irving and Jason Turner, it's a nice way to follow what is happening with the language: https://cppcast.com/ https://cppcast.com/.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  CppCast is great, most of the content is quite good and is a very good way for those of us that mostly work with other languages to still keep up with C++ progress.
- cbfields21 6y ago
  It is strange that there's no official mailing list (except the defunct comp.lang.c++). I recently wondered where one could find new C++ software since there's no announce list at all.
  - dgellow 6y ago
    The German-speaking community has an unofficial forum: https://www.c-plusplus.net/forum/ https://www.c-plusplus.net/forum/
  - bregma 6y ago
    There is also no central authority other than a committee of decentralized interests that meet a couple of times a year to figure out how to keep their published document up to date. One of the tricks with C++ is that it isn't a product created ex cathedra by a single interest group with a focused purpose and provided for you like mother's milk; it's a generalized idea that emerged from a bazaar of interests and provided by a free market for whatever purpose you chose. It has evolved to fill a niche rather than be designed to reach a particular goal (eg. 'kill C++') or even designed to reach a vague goal ('fix all the problems with C'). There is no official mailing list because there is no official 'there' there. C++ is not an organization, or a corporation, or a guy in his mom's basement. It's an idea held (mostly somewhat) in common by a whole lot of people with otherwise no shared interests all over the world.

nonoesp 6y ago

I love Go and I think many people use - it works great in production environments and it's cross-platform by default. Are you insinuating it's not a widely-used language? Without going too far, Docker is written in Go.

ashishmax31 6y ago
I learned Go as my first statically typed language(Worked on ruby and some python before that). Although I missed the functional goodies from Ruby in Go, I thought that was the price I had to pay for performance and static checking guarantees.. Nevertheless, I enjoyed writing Go and its take on writing concurrent programs. As others have called it, I thought of Go as "modern C with garbage collection and first class concurrency primitives". All this changed when I started learning Rust, man was I blown away by the language.. I never thought a statically typed language with manual memory management can feel so "scripting language" like.(Sure the borrow checker annoys you sometimes, nothing a `.clone()` can't fix when you are starting out). I truly enjoy writing Rust these days and never have I missed anything major from Ruby. I'll be damned if I sit here and criticize Ken Thompson and Rob Pike, but I feel like in their quest to make Go "simple" they've perhaps held a little too hard on to their past. tldr; Go feels a little too verbose and "dated" after learning rust.
- totalperspectiv 6y ago
  I had this exact same progression, but with Python instead of Ruby. Go was a great intro to statically typed langurs though, I’d take go over JVM any day. Currently love Rust, but Crystal, Nim, and Swift are all rather distracting. Once Go gets generics I’ll be interested in giving it a second look.

geocar 6y ago

> “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.” Some of those languages that nobody uses, are really good, though. Programmers that learn them hit well above their weight-class in individual-productivity, and if they're lucky they get to support applications written in "dead" languages for fat stacks. Oh and they're often fun too -- who doesn't want to have fun for the 1/3rd of their life that we're supposed to be working? I think I understand that some people want to be popular more than they want to be good, but what I find really weird is the people who would rather be close to popular instead of close to good. What's the point?

kaba0 6y ago
While I also recommend checking out niche languages, the language is only one part. The platform, ecosystem is often much more important, and even in a really great PL, you won’t get an order of magnitude productivity boost over a modern high level language. But of course, having fun is really important.
preommr 6y ago
> Some of those languages that nobody uses, are really good, though. Such as?

zxcvbn4038 6y ago

It seems these articles appear every week now. This should be a solved problem - if you don’t like coding in Go then don’t code in Go. Simple. There is no point of writing a thirty page manifesto of everything you hate about Go. Put that effort into learning python, ruby, nodejs, or whatever floats your boat. If your tempted to write manifestos for those languages also then maybe consider a different line of work.

skywhopper 6y ago
This article is not complaining about Go. It’s pointing out the gotchas, which every language has. IMO it reads like it was written by someone who likes Go quite a bit, or at least is as pragmatic about Go as Go is.
- cratermoon 6y ago
  My favorite books about languages are the ones that point out where the language is ambiguous or otherwise has surprising, e.g C Traps and Pitfalls and Java Puzzlers: Traps, Pitfalls, and Corner Cases, . It would be great if there were programming languages with no surprises, but I don't think that it's possible. Every language has to compromise on some things in order to solve the problems it was designed for.

joelfolksy 6y ago

What a great quote. Next time my wife criticizes me, I'm going to say, "Babe, there are only two kinds of men: the ones their spouses complain about and the ones that aren't married." I'll never have to take out the trash again!