Comment by nickbauman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickbauman | Hacker News Reader

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It reminds me very much of the history of the Java language. The interesting thing about Go is increasingly the runtime/VM and decreasingly the language itself. The same became true with Java vs the JVM. Remember that people like Gosling and Van Hoff used to proudly proclaim how hard they worked to keep out features from Java? Remember how eventually languages like Ruby, Clojure and Scala kept getting more interesting while Java festered (and eventually began stealing from these other languages)?

It sounds a lot like the Go culture. Go 1.6 has no new features. Ho hum. Eventually Gisp will get STM, refs, agents and atoms. Just like no sane person would start a new SaSS using Java when they could choose other languages to run on the JVM that are much better, for example; eventually nobody will write new code in Go when they can use Gisp or some other language that has the missing features. It will happen.

For me (today) I just want to be able to add an element to the middle of a slice in Go without having to read the documentation.

Go runtime is not independently available. This is first time I heard that people are more interested in Go runtime than Go language. It is likely many people care about language being interesting but, where I work, most debate / arguments are about product features not language features. We have been using Java quite productively for long time and do not see any need to change.

> Just like no sane person would start a new SaSS using Java when they could choose other languages to run on the JVM that are much better..

I think Scala is 12 yr old and fair to say it has not taken software industry by storm e.g like Swift. It has maybe few per cent point market share of all JVM languages. And the superiority of their language that Scala developers claim all the time may ensure that Scala will not get any more popular than it currently is. In my interaction with Scala developers are they are more interested in talking how cool is Scala rather than what cool software they have developed with it.

Swift isn't a fair comparison at all because it's a mandated language by Apple. For me Scala is just an improvement on Java. It's valuable to people who fetishize complexity, IOW, people who use Java and like it.

Scala is a highly versatile hybrid language that can be used in a way that doesn't promote needless complexity. Just like you need not use the most advanced OOP features, you need not use advanced FP features, nor do you have to use macros. If you don't want to.

This choice is what makes it an interesting and pleasant language to work with. I've often dealt with Scala code that is much simpler to understand than comparable Java code, but still more often than not, Scala code is made needlessly complicated.

That choice implies a certain kind of respect for the programmer: here's a very, very powerful tool, and use it wisely.

Go is the antithesis of this, and I get its point, it's the opposite philosophical direction. I think it's a direction that will not move the industry forward, it's a direction that will undoubtedly help us produce value---software, reliably---instead of doing something amazing.

Scala has taken the industry by storm, in the sense of the influence it has had on Swift, Rust, TypeScript, Kotlin, etc.

> Just like no sane person would start a new SaSS using Java

Woah you're way off here! Java is still used very heavily in new SaSS. Very very heavily. Easily in the top 5 languages used by new SaSS companies for backend servers.

'sane' is operative word here:-)

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