Hacker News Reader

Comment by kache_ | Hacker News Reader

The basic-ness of golang is the best part about it.

Shows me the power of a good standard library. Such a light weight language, but so many tasks that require third-party libraries in other languages are built right in with equally light weight interfaces.

Yes. Together with Jetbrain's Goland IDE, Go's simplicity allows for most engineers to hit the ground running in Go projects despite not having familiarity with the language. At least that was my experience while working in a team with newcomers.

The lingering issue was package management but then came Go modules and slowly but surely the community is migrating to it from godep and other tools.

This is true. It is also the worst part about it.

It's possible that a huge marketing advantage kept people interested long enough to come to appreciate the benefits of the langauge's basic nature.

I was drawn to Go because it was the only language at the time (or the only one I came across) that allowed me to build and package software without learning a domain specific language and imperatively stitching together my own build system (looking at you, CMake and Gradle). Basically I want to focus on writing my program, not writing programs to build my program.

Go let me run “go build”, and everything Just Worked. It has since become a little more complicated with the introduction of modules, but still vastly better than C++, Java, or Python.

The building and deploying of Go code is refreshingly easy.

I came to Go when modules had been released and found it much easier to understand than GOPATH style workflows. I guess to each their own. I agree, go build, and go distribution is so awesome.

I’m not opposed to modules; there are just some odd edge cases that have given me trouble; probably the error messaging just needs to be improved.

I see very little marketing for Go. Compare, for example, to C# when in came out, or Java when it did.

Did C# have actual "advertising" outside of msdn publications? It came out in 2000 and I don't recall seeing C# ads. (Print publications were out then.)

I picked it up early on and still use it (and F#) today. I've written a lot of custom desktop applications in it.

Yes, The C/C++ Users Journal, DrDobbs, PC World, and Computer Shopper run articles on it.

It was actually released in 2001.

Unless you are speaking about the alphas that MSFT Certified Partners had access to.

They ran articles, of course, but were there "advertisements?" These were publications writing about a major company's major new effort.

There's no advertising today, either. What happens is (for example) Rust/Mozilla foundation's people set out to make every thread on every popular forum about Rust.

Any kind of press is an "advertisement".

That is why people that write about technology are called advocates.

It is my impression (from 18 years later!) that there was a difference. The articles about C#, back in the day, were kind of frustrating to a programmer (or at least to me). There were a lot of words, a lot of description, but not many details (as a programmer would recognize them). The articles were more written for managers than for programmers. That's marketing. (Or so it seems to me. It could be, however, that 18 years ago, I lacked the depth to see the details that were there.)

In contrast, Go's "marketing" is much more aimed at programmers. It's got programmer-level details. It's not trying to sell your manager on the language.

> What happens is (for example) Rust/Mozilla foundation's people set out to make every thread on every popular forum about Rust.

I completely disagree with this characterization.

I remember going to Barnes and Noble and buying a programming magazine because it came bundled with a beta version of the .NET framework circa 2001.

The marketing advantage is largely from being associated with Google and Pike and Thompson. That's a good way to get the world to spread the word for free.

IMO that’s the only reason it gained traction. New languages are a dime a dozen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com