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> I know there is a lot of hate for Java on HN I can't speak to the technical merits of either language, but something can be said about choosing a language wi

by lojack 12y ago

> I know there is a lot of hate for Java on HN I can't speak to the technical merits of either language, but something can be said about choosing a language with a lot of hype as opposed to one that's hated in the community. From a recruitment perspective, choosing Go may be more favorable in a lot of developers eyes.

matthewmacleod 12y ago
I can't speak to the technical merits of either language, but something can be said about choosing a language with a lot of hype as opposed to one that's hated in the community. From a recruitment perspective, choosing Go may be more favorable in a lot of developers eyes. The problem is that the 'HN community' has IMO a pretty small overlap with the overall software development community. Hype in the former does not equate to hype in the latter.
sz4kerto 12y ago
Java is hated in 'the community'? Well, Java is not hated at all in the Java community, it just happens that HN is a place where people are hyping the latest & greatest stuff - until it turns out that it isn't _that_ better than the old stuff. Go does not represent a fundamental paradigm shift, it's just a language with slightly different compromises to Java. We have a _lot_ of experience with Java in the industry so we know the advantages and weaknesses -- not so much with Go. "From a recruitment perspective, choosing Go may be more favorable in a lot of developers eyes." -- from a recruitment perspective it's extremely easy to find (experienced) Java devs, and not so easy to find (experienced) Go devs.
- beagle3 12y ago
  > it just happens that HN is a place where people are hyping the latest & greatest stuff - until it turns out that it isn't _that_ better than the old stuff. That brought a smile to my face. I've been saying this about Java since 1994. > from a recruitment perspective it's extremely easy to find (experienced) Java devs, From my experience, that is true in the literal sense of "experienced = having experience". But not so true in the sense of "experienced = competent and knows their stuff", which is often implied. One of the things about new and fringe languages is that they are effectively a competence filter: It is much more likely that e.g. a Lisp programmer, a Haskell programmer, an OCaml programmer or a $NEW_HOTNESS programmer for most values of $NEW_HOTNESS is a good one. I suspect Go is beyond NEW_HOTNESS status to work as a filter, though.
- NateDad 12y ago
  One nice thing about go is that you don't have to hire good "Go devs", you can just hire good devs and they can learn Go in a week. We do that on Juju. 2/3rds of our devs wrote their first line of go on the job, and were still productive right away.

by lojack 12y ago

matthewmacleod 12y ago

I can't speak to the technical merits of either language, but something can be said about choosing a language with a lot of hype as opposed to one that's hated in the community. From a recruitment perspective, choosing Go may be more favorable in a lot of developers eyes. The problem is that the 'HN community' has IMO a pretty small overlap with the overall software development community. Hype in the former does not equate to hype in the latter.

sz4kerto 12y ago

Java is hated in 'the community'? Well, Java is not hated at all in the Java community, it just happens that HN is a place where people are hyping the latest & greatest stuff - until it turns out that it isn't _that_ better than the old stuff. Go does not represent a fundamental paradigm shift, it's just a language with slightly different compromises to Java. We have a _lot_ of experience with Java in the industry so we know the advantages and weaknesses -- not so much with Go. "From a recruitment perspective, choosing Go may be more favorable in a lot of developers eyes." -- from a recruitment perspective it's extremely easy to find (experienced) Java devs, and not so easy to find (experienced) Go devs.

beagle3 12y ago
> it just happens that HN is a place where people are hyping the latest & greatest stuff - until it turns out that it isn't _that_ better than the old stuff. That brought a smile to my face. I've been saying this about Java since 1994. > from a recruitment perspective it's extremely easy to find (experienced) Java devs, From my experience, that is true in the literal sense of "experienced = having experience". But not so true in the sense of "experienced = competent and knows their stuff", which is often implied. One of the things about new and fringe languages is that they are effectively a competence filter: It is much more likely that e.g. a Lisp programmer, a Haskell programmer, an OCaml programmer or a $NEW_HOTNESS programmer for most values of $NEW_HOTNESS is a good one. I suspect Go is beyond NEW_HOTNESS status to work as a filter, though.
NateDad 12y ago
One nice thing about go is that you don't have to hire good "Go devs", you can just hire good devs and they can learn Go in a week. We do that on Juju. 2/3rds of our devs wrote their first line of go on the job, and were still productive right away.