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Comment by placeybordeaux | Hacker News Reader

>Go: Go is utter shit that only survives due to the devs name-dropping "Google" every 5 minutes.

Making blanket statements like that without any substantiation makes me want to just write off everything else you have said.

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To my mind writing off Go is table stakes for having an interesting discussion about modern programming language choice - anyone who takes Go seriously is coming from a position so different from mine that it would take many pages (all of which would be rehashing of old discussions) to bridge the gap, and I honestly can't be bothered. While I would try not to be so rude about it, I think GP is right to dismiss the language without going into detailed reasons; there are any number of threads about Go that cover the case for and against already.

I agree with you that they are just 2 very different language in philosophy and usage. To my mind Go is about boring technology used to make interesting and very popular products while Scala is about exploring cutting edge in PL theory.

One can see most work on Scala in git commits is done either by few people at a research institute(EPFL) or at a consulting company(lightbend) whereas Go has quite varied committer profiles and there are far more committers.

> To my mind Go is about boring technology used to make interesting and very popular products while Scala is about exploring cutting edge in PL theory.

I would strongly disagree with the implication that Scala isn't used to make interesting or popular products (e.g. Spark or twitter), or indeed that it's "exploring" anything "cutting-edge"; it is very much a production-quality language (backed by theory sure, but theory that's been established for decades now), and I don't see that it contains anything more novel or experimental than e.g. Go's concurrency model. It's a decent platform for doing research in, but that's mostly just a question of being a good language.

> One can see most work on Scala in git commits is done either by few people at a research institute(EPFL) or at a consulting company(lightbend) whereas Go has quite varied committer profiles and there are far more committers.

We're talking about a factor of 2-3 in number of committers, not that I have any idea what that number is supposed to tell anyone. Certainly Scala has substantial industrial support and a wide base of contributors.

Go is obviously pretty god awful when it comes to design when viewed strictly as a language. The language is mind numbingly boring and restrictive. The reason why people are interested in go (at least IMO) is because of stuff that isn't really about the language design. They are interested in the subsecond compile times out of the box. They are interested in one of the best standard libraries out there, a static binary that has subsecond start up times, a GC that doesn't require lots of tuning, a language spec so simple and a standard formatter so most code looks the same, etc.

The language it's self has no beauty and is not fun or interesting like scala. But I still love it and would totally base my company on it if I was planning on hiring thousands of developers and training them to use it. I would be scared of doing that with scala.

I guess I can see the case for using Go for something basic like CRUD that you just want to "crank out". But to my mind the kind of code you can program that way shouldn't be something you program at all - rather you write a system that handles it all generically (e.g. Rails/Django have generic model editor forms). Maybe in a business where programming is incidental it makes sense? But certainly it would destroy any kind of "hitting the high notes" business.

> But certainly it would destroy any kind of "hitting the high notes" business.

Not sure what you mean by that.

I still think that you are not really thinking about how many non-language pain points go takes care of. You don't really worry about a library being the wrong version, you need extremely little special training for a new developer to start on a go code base (compared to FP which requires a paradigm shift for most people), the people that have to setup the servers generally appreciate something that only requires a static binary to be dropped on the server and executed. Almost none of the things that make go great are actually related to programming languages, where as some of the best things about scala are all of the elegant ways you can express computation.

So what? If you can't tolerate an opinion I can imagine you are having a hard time on the internet. :-)

It does a discredit to any other better substantiated or more reasonable opinion you have stated.

For better or for worse when most people hear a new statement or opinion coming from someone they will trust it as much as they trust the least believable thing they have heard that person say.

This sounds like a very US-trigger-warning-safe-spacey stance.

I think most people on this planet are able to consider each point at its face value.

> I think most people on this planet are able to consider each point at its face value.

Humans have a pretty strong demonstrated tendency to develop positive or negative emotional attachments to pretty much everything, including sources of information/arguments, and see the world strongly filtered through those. This is, while it can be misleading, an important evolved survival mechanism in terms of attention/resource management.

Most people probably can, by expending effort, mitigate that to a certain extent, but that doesn't negate it completely.

People who can't assess statements objectively are probably exactly those people whose opinion I couldn't care less about.

Perhaps this is exactly the filter I want to have.

So you would not assess their other statements objectively?

A few different people are trying to politely show you a way you're undercutting yourself.

And that's perfectly fine! I won't throw a tantrum because I might disagree (which I don't).

This is not about safe spaces, this is about basic human psychology.

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