Hacker News Reader

Comment by systems | Hacker News Reader

well, the ecosystem is usually the answer, Go is a simple language, which attracted many developers, which resulted in a large ecosystem

but there is also the issue of complexity developer used Go to create complex systems, because it is a simple language, it allowed them to focus on the solution

while, complex systems, might be simpler if they were built using complex languages, it seems most developer prefer to build complex systems using simple languages, rather than build simple systems using complex languages

complexity doesn't disappear you can only spread it around, to make it more manageable .. using a simple language and moving complexity to the solution, seems like a trade off many are willing to make .. so this is not necessarily a bad thing .. its a preference

if Go starts adding complex features, many developers will move or chose another language ..

View on HN

> it seems most developer prefer to build complex systems using simple languages, rather than build simple systems using complex languages

According to TIOBE, 1% of programmers are using Go, whilst 23% are using Java or C++.

If that is to be believed, developers do not appear to prefer simple languages. Or, Java and C++ are simple languages. Or, language selection is not based on preference.

well while many question TIOBE, i believe a lot fewer will question the empirical observation that C# and Java are bigger in the job market than C++

C# and Java both are a lot simpler than C++

i would even argue that by adding more features into Java and C#, a door was opened to PHP, Python, Ruby and now GO

i still stand by conclusion, that most developer prefer to move complexity to the solution and away from the language

and to be clear, i saying that this is a preference and taste issue, i am not saying that one is better than the other, i am not even saying that developers who prefer complex languages have bad taste ... it is just the way it is ... others have expressed it in more length

https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

Simple languages like Go just put the burden of complexity on the shoulders of developers, that end up implementing ad-hoc solutions for what other languages support natively.

Hence how we end up with factory-factory classes, aspect oriented programming, patterns and stuff.

On Go's case, how we now have n variants of code generation libraries or multiple solutions to sort out dependencies and vendoring.

GoSpring and GoEE, similar to Java 1.2 days, should be quite interesting to see.

and today on xkcd

https://xkcd.com/1987/

Python is another example of a simple language + complex everything else

or at least a language that started simple

Reply on news.ycombinator.com