4 ms·

golang is decent and is the only new lang climbed up to 7th in popularity, it does shine at what it's good at

mvdtnz 2y ago
You're missing the point completely.
pclmulqdq 2y ago
The go and rust crowds both love writing things in their own language for its own sake. Not because it's a good choice. For a large web backend, go is great. For many other things it's terrible.
- pdimitar 2y ago
  > The go and rust crowds both love writing things in their own language for its own sake Hard to take you seriously when you do such weird generalized takes. While it's a sad fact that fanboys and zealots absolutely do exist, most devs can't afford to be such and have to be pragmatic. They pick languages based on merit and analysis.
  - pclmulqdq 2y ago
    Most of the people who use Go and Rust do it for pragmatic reasons. That doesn't influence the culture of the zealots in each community. You should search for headlines on HN that say "written in Go" or "written in Rust" and then compare that to the number of headlines that say "written in JavaScript" or "written in Kotlin."
    - nativeit 2y ago
      I understand the criticism that languages should be pragmatic choices they serve the strengths of the project at hand, but I guess I always found most projects boasting they’re written in a specific language or framework are doing so precisely because of the overarching interest in the language itself, which seems like a perfectly valid justification for such projects to me. I’ve seen the more cynical hype-driven stuff, but it’s inevitably superficial on first glance, where I have seen some real curiosity and exploration in many “Project X - Built In Rust/Go/Cobol/D/Whatever” and I think they’re exploring the dynamics of the language and tooling as much as anything else.
    - whstl 2y ago
      This is not a sign or a proof of zealotry.
    - pdimitar 2y ago
      Those headlines help me understand what I am getting so I seriously have no idea what argument you are trying to make. You do seem to say Golang and/or Rust devs are zealots which, if it is indeed what you are saying, is boring and plain false.
  - hibikir 2y ago
    You are very fortunate: In my 20 year career, I've spent most of it surrounded by zealots, including at very well known firms. I am currently surrounded by multiple teams with extremely tight ideas of what languages they want to work in. All different ideas, yet they are working basically with the same constraints: it's not as if they ware doing very different work where another team's language would be unfit for purpose. The performance is similar, and they are basically in a culture war. They have passionate arguments listing why a different team's choice is all wrong: None hold any real water. I am especially valuable because I am fine reading and writing any of the languages involved. The management likes that, but there's a lot of difficulties solving the tribal problem, as the leads are basically all crazy zealots, and it's not as if purging one or two factions of zealots would avoid further zealotry from the survivors. The fact that I can work across all their tech doesn't make me many friends, as my work across systems shows their arguments have little merit. For most work, in most cases, most languages are just fine. The completely wrong tool for the job is pretty rare, and the winning argument in most places is "we have the most people that have experience with tool X, or really want to try exciting new thing Y", for whatever the problem is, and whatever X might be.
    - pdimitar 2y ago
      What's preventing you from working in a less dysfunctional place, exactly?
- zozbot234 2y ago
  Rust is pretty antithetical to resume-driven development because a lot of the stuff that's written in Rust is too well-written and free of the usual kinds of software defects. It immediately becomes "done" and enters low-effort maintenance mode, there's just very little reason to get involved with it anymore since "it just works". Believe it or not, this whole dynamic is behind a lot of the complaints about Rust in the workplace. It's literally making things too easy.
  - ohgr 2y ago
    Having watched two entirely fucked up Rust projects get written off I think you need to get out more.
  - LPisGood 2y ago
    It’s not that I don’t believe you, hut that I’m having trouble seeing how what you say could be true. Rust projects immediately become “done”??? They don’t also having changing requirements and dependencies? Why aren’t everyone at the best shops using it for everything if it massively eliminates work load?
  - pclmulqdq 2y ago
    I have to say that the median crate I interact with has the following readme: " Version 0.2 - Unstable/buggy/slow unless you use exactly like the example - not going to get updated because I moved on to something else" Rust is another programming language. It's easier to write code without a certain class of bugs, but that doesn't mean version 0.2 of a casual project is going to be bug-free.
  - conjectures 2y ago
    Not from what I've seen. The compiler is slow af which plays badly with how fussy the thing is. It's easy to have no defects in functionality you never got around to writing because you ran out of time.
    - rescbr 2y ago
      So it makes you think before typing and compiling the code? Doesn’t look like a con to me :)
- whstl 2y ago
  Life is too short to program on languages one doesn't love. Those people, if they really exist, are right.
  - pclmulqdq 2y ago
    To be honest, I agree with you, and I think this is the right approach to life if you have a strong preference for languages. I think this only gets a bad name when people aren't upfront about their preferences and skills, with a lot of people having bad experiences with a go zealot at some point.
    - whstl 2y ago
      It seems the zealotry here is not coming from the Go and Rust people, though. From another message, your measure of presence of zealots is by the amount of "HN titles". Rewriting something in Go or Rust and announcing it is not being a Zealot. Being enthusiastic about something shouldn't be a cause for us to judge them like this. We should be happy about them.

You're missing the point completely.

The go and rust crowds both love writing things in their own language for its own sake. Not because it's a good choice. For a large web backend, go is great. For many other things it's terrible.

pdimitar 2y ago
> The go and rust crowds both love writing things in their own language for its own sake Hard to take you seriously when you do such weird generalized takes. While it's a sad fact that fanboys and zealots absolutely do exist, most devs can't afford to be such and have to be pragmatic. They pick languages based on merit and analysis.
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  Most of the people who use Go and Rust do it for pragmatic reasons. That doesn't influence the culture of the zealots in each community. You should search for headlines on HN that say "written in Go" or "written in Rust" and then compare that to the number of headlines that say "written in JavaScript" or "written in Kotlin."
  - nativeit 2y ago
    I understand the criticism that languages should be pragmatic choices they serve the strengths of the project at hand, but I guess I always found most projects boasting they’re written in a specific language or framework are doing so precisely because of the overarching interest in the language itself, which seems like a perfectly valid justification for such projects to me. I’ve seen the more cynical hype-driven stuff, but it’s inevitably superficial on first glance, where I have seen some real curiosity and exploration in many “Project X - Built In Rust/Go/Cobol/D/Whatever” and I think they’re exploring the dynamics of the language and tooling as much as anything else.
  - whstl 2y ago
    This is not a sign or a proof of zealotry.
  - pdimitar 2y ago
    Those headlines help me understand what I am getting so I seriously have no idea what argument you are trying to make. You do seem to say Golang and/or Rust devs are zealots which, if it is indeed what you are saying, is boring and plain false.
- hibikir 2y ago
  You are very fortunate: In my 20 year career, I've spent most of it surrounded by zealots, including at very well known firms. I am currently surrounded by multiple teams with extremely tight ideas of what languages they want to work in. All different ideas, yet they are working basically with the same constraints: it's not as if they ware doing very different work where another team's language would be unfit for purpose. The performance is similar, and they are basically in a culture war. They have passionate arguments listing why a different team's choice is all wrong: None hold any real water. I am especially valuable because I am fine reading and writing any of the languages involved. The management likes that, but there's a lot of difficulties solving the tribal problem, as the leads are basically all crazy zealots, and it's not as if purging one or two factions of zealots would avoid further zealotry from the survivors. The fact that I can work across all their tech doesn't make me many friends, as my work across systems shows their arguments have little merit. For most work, in most cases, most languages are just fine. The completely wrong tool for the job is pretty rare, and the winning argument in most places is "we have the most people that have experience with tool X, or really want to try exciting new thing Y", for whatever the problem is, and whatever X might be.
  - pdimitar 2y ago
    What's preventing you from working in a less dysfunctional place, exactly?
zozbot234 2y ago
Rust is pretty antithetical to resume-driven development because a lot of the stuff that's written in Rust is too well-written and free of the usual kinds of software defects. It immediately becomes "done" and enters low-effort maintenance mode, there's just very little reason to get involved with it anymore since "it just works". Believe it or not, this whole dynamic is behind a lot of the complaints about Rust in the workplace. It's literally making things too easy.
- ohgr 2y ago
  Having watched two entirely fucked up Rust projects get written off I think you need to get out more.
- LPisGood 2y ago
  It’s not that I don’t believe you, hut that I’m having trouble seeing how what you say could be true. Rust projects immediately become “done”??? They don’t also having changing requirements and dependencies? Why aren’t everyone at the best shops using it for everything if it massively eliminates work load?
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  I have to say that the median crate I interact with has the following readme: " Version 0.2 - Unstable/buggy/slow unless you use exactly like the example - not going to get updated because I moved on to something else" Rust is another programming language. It's easier to write code without a certain class of bugs, but that doesn't mean version 0.2 of a casual project is going to be bug-free.
- conjectures 2y ago
  Not from what I've seen. The compiler is slow af which plays badly with how fussy the thing is. It's easy to have no defects in functionality you never got around to writing because you ran out of time.
  - rescbr 2y ago
    So it makes you think before typing and compiling the code? Doesn’t look like a con to me :)
whstl 2y ago
Life is too short to program on languages one doesn't love. Those people, if they really exist, are right.
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  To be honest, I agree with you, and I think this is the right approach to life if you have a strong preference for languages. I think this only gets a bad name when people aren't upfront about their preferences and skills, with a lot of people having bad experiences with a go zealot at some point.
  - whstl 2y ago
    It seems the zealotry here is not coming from the Go and Rust people, though. From another message, your measure of presence of zealots is by the amount of "HN titles". Rewriting something in Go or Rust and announcing it is not being a Zealot. Being enthusiastic about something shouldn't be a cause for us to judge them like this. We should be happy about them.