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Interesting. Would your opinion change if you where only in charge of the API? I.e. VueJS/React/Angular on the top by another team..

herczegzsolt 4y ago
Not entirely. It is a lot quicker to develop APIs in Go than to develop webpages. It is a very convenient choice and it's excellent compatibility promise makes it stable in long-term. It'll still be slower to develop and iterate initially with Go, than with a bodged PHP or nodejs backend. I'm somewhat comparing apples to oranges, because you could of course create very high quality, well-designed PHP or nodejs code. In that case it'll probably not be any quicker. The point is that you can quickly bodge in PHP a lot of stuff which you couldn't in Go. In my oppinion this is a benefit of Go in the long-term, but a signifcant overhead in the short term when you just need to get things done.
- TigerTeamX 4y ago
  These are good points. what would change your mind besides the long term? What if you for example were in a team with multiple devs working on the backend? And what do you consider long-term? :)
  - herczegzsolt 4y ago
    This question sounds like you want to use Go and looking for justification :-). To answer your question properly: I think programming language should be a financial choice for any company, and one of the highest cost factors is developer hours. All that i've described earlier is about optimising for developer hours. If there's a nieche reason to prefer a language that may override all points i've described. For example, hardware support, availability of project-specific library, language preferences of customers, compliance requirements. As for long term, i'd say 3-5 years is a tipping point, where maintaining PHP/Python becames more painful then just using Go. Probably a bit sooner for nodejs with the npm dependency hell. But i'd warn you about choosing Go due to planning your product to exist for more than 3-5 years. You'll almost certainly have multiple rewrites of your code before you get to a state where it actually lives for 5 years - if at all. Do yourself a favor and prototype in a quick language. Maybe even have your first versions out ugly and bodged. You'll have a chance to rewrite if and when you have customers and a working business model. Lastly but most importantly, these are commercial considerations. For a non-commercial project, you should ignore these and optimize for developer-happiness instead. I like Go. I'd choose Go over PHP/Python/nodejs anytime as a developer. You should choose whatever you like the best. If you ask me, you should like Go the best :-)

herczegzsolt 4y ago

Not entirely. It is a lot quicker to develop APIs in Go than to develop webpages. It is a very convenient choice and it's excellent compatibility promise makes it stable in long-term. It'll still be slower to develop and iterate initially with Go, than with a bodged PHP or nodejs backend. I'm somewhat comparing apples to oranges, because you could of course create very high quality, well-designed PHP or nodejs code. In that case it'll probably not be any quicker. The point is that you can quickly bodge in PHP a lot of stuff which you couldn't in Go. In my oppinion this is a benefit of Go in the long-term, but a signifcant overhead in the short term when you just need to get things done.

TigerTeamX 4y ago
These are good points. what would change your mind besides the long term? What if you for example were in a team with multiple devs working on the backend? And what do you consider long-term? :)
- herczegzsolt 4y ago
  This question sounds like you want to use Go and looking for justification :-). To answer your question properly: I think programming language should be a financial choice for any company, and one of the highest cost factors is developer hours. All that i've described earlier is about optimising for developer hours. If there's a nieche reason to prefer a language that may override all points i've described. For example, hardware support, availability of project-specific library, language preferences of customers, compliance requirements. As for long term, i'd say 3-5 years is a tipping point, where maintaining PHP/Python becames more painful then just using Go. Probably a bit sooner for nodejs with the npm dependency hell. But i'd warn you about choosing Go due to planning your product to exist for more than 3-5 years. You'll almost certainly have multiple rewrites of your code before you get to a state where it actually lives for 5 years - if at all. Do yourself a favor and prototype in a quick language. Maybe even have your first versions out ugly and bodged. You'll have a chance to rewrite if and when you have customers and a working business model. Lastly but most importantly, these are commercial considerations. For a non-commercial project, you should ignore these and optimize for developer-happiness instead. I like Go. I'd choose Go over PHP/Python/nodejs anytime as a developer. You should choose whatever you like the best. If you ask me, you should like Go the best :-)