10 ms·

Go was made popular and successful for only one reason, google used/made it. And this was at the height of googles coolness. So other companies followed on the

Go was made popular and successful for only one reason, google used/made it. And this was at the height of googles coolness. So other companies followed on the bandwagon, or were made by former google developers and brought it over. The success is completely secondary to how many people like go or the features it has. As far as simplicity I think I would disagree and agree with that. Rust is not a simple language. Other languages like F# or Scala or Kotlin that have arisen in the same timeframe as go are also not simple. But they do try and make some hard things easier, like concurrency or type safety.

coldtea 3y ago
Well, Google also made Dart and it went nowhere. So it's not necessarily that. Go had a simple familiar syntax that's easy to pick up, decent tooling from the get go, good enough speed and memory use, and promised easy parallelism. It also arrived at 1.0 relatively quickly and quite mature with few rough edges and a feature full standard lib. Most "indie" languages don't have those even after 10 years of development.
- syntheweave 3y ago
  Go's good parts are basically the parts inherited from Bell Labs - the channels are an echo of Plan9's 9p protocol being used everywhere, and the style syntactically and in metaprogramming capability remains close to C, but with refinements like using Unicode. Which adds up to it being a decent language for making networked software and small "one-thing-well" utilities. If it were actually used in production on Plan9, a lot of the idioms would become that much more powerful, as more of the interfacing glue could be handled by the shell and 9p namespaces, but as it is, it gets bogged down by compatibility issues.
  - p_l 3y ago
    Some of the things that people found confusing in Go (GOPATH etc) are due to the fact that Go's native environment is Plan 9, down to using Plan 9 libraries and compilers before the full self-hosting rewrite was done
zogrodea 3y ago
Is F# not easy? You're just writing functions and there's low syntactic (curly braces, defining classes, etc.) overhead which means a high signal-to-noise ratio. I think it might be a little more complicated than Python (because of static vs dynamic typing) but you can go quite far without introducing more complicated features. I personally think it would be easier to teach a beginner F# (just the language, not the ecosystem like ASP.NET or Spring) than C# or Java.
- 7thaccount 3y ago
  I tried learning F# with nearly zero .NET knowledge and found it a horrific experience. In comparison, Python, Perl, and many more languages were a cake walk. It wasn't the FP paradigm, but doing anything useful without already knowing the .NET libraries and C#. I have most of the books and they're worthless to me as they assume I'm a seasoned .NET enterprise developer. I eventually gave up after trying several times.
p_l 3y ago
A considerable portion of what made Go popular are things related to development and deployment, in addition to Plan9 derived standard library expanded with various everyday-useful modules. The fact that you quickly got a static binary that just worked even if you removed GLIBC, that the standard library provided a way less broken network interface by default instead of BSD Sockets ("Revenge of the XTI" it should be called :D), that the language was garbage collected, and that said standard library: - made UTF-8 default and norm - provided bunch of often needed things like sensible HTTP client & server - a reasonably good multiprocessing with syntax sugar from the language All of those meant that a lot of what, for various reasons, people would be writing in Python previously for various "ops" support programs etc. would suddenly a way better experience with Go.
bmitc 3y ago
I would argue that F# is far more simple at its core than the core of Rust, Scala, and Kotlin. It only gets complicated when you're getting into advanced features, but it is still a very pragmatic language.

coldtea 3y ago

Well, Google also made Dart and it went nowhere. So it's not necessarily that. Go had a simple familiar syntax that's easy to pick up, decent tooling from the get go, good enough speed and memory use, and promised easy parallelism. It also arrived at 1.0 relatively quickly and quite mature with few rough edges and a feature full standard lib. Most "indie" languages don't have those even after 10 years of development.

syntheweave 3y ago
Go's good parts are basically the parts inherited from Bell Labs - the channels are an echo of Plan9's 9p protocol being used everywhere, and the style syntactically and in metaprogramming capability remains close to C, but with refinements like using Unicode. Which adds up to it being a decent language for making networked software and small "one-thing-well" utilities. If it were actually used in production on Plan9, a lot of the idioms would become that much more powerful, as more of the interfacing glue could be handled by the shell and 9p namespaces, but as it is, it gets bogged down by compatibility issues.
- p_l 3y ago
  Some of the things that people found confusing in Go (GOPATH etc) are due to the fact that Go's native environment is Plan 9, down to using Plan 9 libraries and compilers before the full self-hosting rewrite was done

zogrodea 3y ago

Is F# not easy? You're just writing functions and there's low syntactic (curly braces, defining classes, etc.) overhead which means a high signal-to-noise ratio. I think it might be a little more complicated than Python (because of static vs dynamic typing) but you can go quite far without introducing more complicated features. I personally think it would be easier to teach a beginner F# (just the language, not the ecosystem like ASP.NET or Spring) than C# or Java.

7thaccount 3y ago
I tried learning F# with nearly zero .NET knowledge and found it a horrific experience. In comparison, Python, Perl, and many more languages were a cake walk. It wasn't the FP paradigm, but doing anything useful without already knowing the .NET libraries and C#. I have most of the books and they're worthless to me as they assume I'm a seasoned .NET enterprise developer. I eventually gave up after trying several times.

p_l 3y ago

A considerable portion of what made Go popular are things related to development and deployment, in addition to Plan9 derived standard library expanded with various everyday-useful modules. The fact that you quickly got a static binary that just worked even if you removed GLIBC, that the standard library provided a way less broken network interface by default instead of BSD Sockets ("Revenge of the XTI" it should be called :D), that the language was garbage collected, and that said standard library: - made UTF-8 default and norm - provided bunch of often needed things like sensible HTTP client & server - a reasonably good multiprocessing with syntax sugar from the language All of those meant that a lot of what, for various reasons, people would be writing in Python previously for various "ops" support programs etc. would suddenly a way better experience with Go.

bmitc 3y ago

I would argue that F# is far more simple at its core than the core of Rust, Scala, and Kotlin. It only gets complicated when you're getting into advanced features, but it is still a very pragmatic language.