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Comment by PeterStuer | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how many languages that got significant traction did not follow the pattern of being successful in a niche, then riding on the coattails of that niche booming.

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Any language that had an institutional patron would be a good candidate for this category of language. e.g. I don't think we would say Go targeted a niche and then got big by that. Go was promoted heavily by Google, and that's why people took interest.

Docker and Kubernetes basically.

Many forget the fact that the distributed operating system of the cloud has been written in Go. As much as I love C, I know its limitations and I hope it will be replaced by Zig some day, or by a simple language akin to the philosophy of Niklaus Wirth, Robin Milner, Rob Pike, Ken Thompson and Leslie Lamport. Even Java and TypeScript are getting too big for my taste and they have been my main languages for the past 3 years.

Ironically Kubernetes started as Java and was re-written in Go, as some Go enthusiastic devs joined the team and pushed for a rewrite.

How successful Kubernetes would have been if the rewrite had not taken place belongs to what-if guessing.

Indeed, that's fair, I'm not sure if Java would have been the right choice in the case of cloud infrastructure. I mean, at the application level I would always pick Java over Go for something like a distributed analytics engine, streaming or just swarms of microservices. Our new smart traffic simulation system is written in Java with the client in TypeScript. But the infrastructure it's all Terraform and Go utilities. It's a rewrite of an old system which was in C++ with Lua embedded. Maybe today GraalVM with native image fixed some of the issues, plus Valhalla will make it even better but that's still a long way to go.

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