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I think this claim is too reductionistic to go anywhere. There is no single thing that can explain go’s success. There are hundreds of small differences in the

I think this claim is too reductionistic to go anywhere. There is no single thing that can explain go’s success. There are hundreds of small differences in the language (and tooling, which arguably is more important). Most people are not going to care enough (or have the time) to enumerate every single difference between go and Java, and why they prefer the trade off go makes. I use Java professionally, and go where I can, and there is a lot I prefer about go (I won’t pretend it’s uniformly better, though.) And fwiw, me and you have gone back and forth about this question in many threads previously. I think asking it from such a high level is not going to very effectively get into the details that actually matter to people. Finally, I also think a lot of what makes go preferable is not in the realm of language design (at least not the algebraic type theory kind) or specific features. It’s much squishier than that, and involves feelings about how teams work and what developers do in practice (and why they fail).

kaba0 3y ago
Then let me ask instead: why does Go hit the HN front page each day? I would say Rust used to be/is similarly hyped, but it is sort of understandable there, as it is built on a novel idea and fits a previously unoccupied space. This is not true of Go, and we could just as well see just as many D, Java, C#, Haskell, OCaml posts, yet they combined are not as frequent “visitors”.
- philosopher1234 3y ago
  I think there is something that advocates/users of Go see in it that they don't feel has been understood by its detractors. And on the flip side, I think the detractors are not very interested in understanding what is good about Go, instead it seems more like a nuisance to be swatted away. I think this creates a great deal of tension between the two, and leads to massive blowup threads. So long as issues (like error handling) persist where these groups cant understand each other, i think the same arguments will repeat.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    Thanks, you are likely correct.

kaba0 3y ago

Then let me ask instead: why does Go hit the HN front page each day? I would say Rust used to be/is similarly hyped, but it is sort of understandable there, as it is built on a novel idea and fits a previously unoccupied space. This is not true of Go, and we could just as well see just as many D, Java, C#, Haskell, OCaml posts, yet they combined are not as frequent “visitors”.

philosopher1234 3y ago
I think there is something that advocates/users of Go see in it that they don't feel has been understood by its detractors. And on the flip side, I think the detractors are not very interested in understanding what is good about Go, instead it seems more like a nuisance to be swatted away. I think this creates a great deal of tension between the two, and leads to massive blowup threads. So long as issues (like error handling) persist where these groups cant understand each other, i think the same arguments will repeat.
- kaba0 3y ago
  Thanks, you are likely correct.