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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Go's popularity is due to author's employer.

Both its main influences, Oberon-2 and Limbo had zero traction on the market, and Limbo not only is quite close to Go, it had an whole OS full of the Plan 9 ideas to come along, yet it failed on the market.

Lack of generics has already been publicly acknowldge as problem.

> In three years of Go surveys, lack of generics has always been listed as one of the top three problems to fix in the language.

https://blog.golang.org/why-generics

And yes, there is no place on the 21st century for typed languages without generics, we already have enough of them from the previous century already.

CLU and ML, the first languages to support genericity are from the mid-70's, they are older than C++ and contemporary to C.

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I think Go is popular because of its simplicity and fantastic standard library.

It can also feel sometimes like a dynamic language which has attracted people from ruby, python, JS, etc... communities.

You say there's no place for it in the 21st century, yet it already has a place and it doesn't really need generics to continue living.

Thanks to generics and lambdas, Java's standard library includes concurrent mapreduce. Lacking generics, Go's standard library can't even offer https://golang.org/pkg/sync/#Map without sacrificing type safety.

I agree Java streams and concurrent collections are great.

I agree Go cannot offer similar things due to a weaker type system.

I willingly code Go day-to-day. I miss Java streams, and sometimes the codebase is slightly worse due to the lack of Java streams (or equivalent).

I accept a weaker language because I spend less time debating the Right Way to do things (Go is too inexpressive to support a Right Way), and because I can widen my hiring pool from those that know Java, to those that any language, knowing that they can easily pick up Go.

> Go's popularity is due to author's employer.

Why isn't Dart seeing the same type of success?

Because it was dropped on the floor by the Chrome team, which lead to the original team leaving Google, if they had shipped Dartium the outcome would be much different.

Is Dart's lack of popularity in spite of its author's employer, then?

Dart's lack of popularity is indeed in spite of the Google backing. I basically see two reasons. First, though Lars Bak has an impressive pedigree, Strongtalk and V8 aren't as well-known as Plan 9 and Unix. Moreover, rightly or wrongly, Dart had the appearance of "Google's attempt to kill JS", which neither endeared it to Web developers (who were riding a wave of JavaScript hype at the time) nor to other browser manufacturers (who were growing increasingly distrustful of Google's initiatives).

Because it was dropped on the floor by the Chrome team, which lead to the original team leaving Google.

Original Go team did not suffer from this.

> Lack of generics has already been publicly acknowldge as problem.

That's from people who complain because they want Golang to be like Java

It is more people that don't want Go be a plain Limbo remake.

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