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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

But he doesn't dive deeper! If anything, he's more shallow. This just doesn't read like an honest appraisal of Go's pros and cons to me, he already has his mind set from the beginning (ok, we knew that two years ago already) and is just heaping on invectives: "one really good bit does not a platform make", "Evidently, the Go team didn't want to design a language", "Go is not adequate for production services unless your shop is literally made up of Go experts (Tailscale) or you have infinite money to spend on engineering costs (Google)" etc. etc.

What makes me angry about all this Go-bashing is that it might influence decision makers against moving from things like PHP or Node to Go - which I think would be an improvement, no matter how many flaws Go may or may not have.

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> What makes me angry about all this Go-bashing

It's just a language! Take it easy.

The guy is not "heaping on invectives" - he's not criticizing you or someone you care about. He's pointing out some flaws in a language in a sarcastic way.

I would consider "Evidently, the Go team didn't want to design a language" to be at least borderline invective. From dictionary.com, definition 3: "an insulting or abusive word or expression". Yeah, that's pretty clearly insulting.

Oh just some sarcasm:

"Mom smokes, so it's probably okay"

"I remember fondly the time an audience member asked the Go team "why did you choose to ignore any research about type systems since the 1970s"? (Emphasis his, not mine)

"It doesn't matter who points out that "maybe we shouldn't hit ourselves in the head with a rake repeatedly""

"Or you can be horrified, as you realize that those complex problems only exist because Go is being used."

"you adopted a language that happened by accident" (a direct criticism at Go users)

"Evidently, the Go team didn't want to design a language."

"Because it needed to be familiar to "Googlers, fresh out of school, who probably learned some Java/C/C++/Python" (Rob Pike, Lang NEXT 2014), it borrowed from all of these."

I just have up here. Do you really think a production conversation can start from this? ESR has flamed less haughtily.

It only hurts, because it is true.

Oh just some sarcasm:

"Mom smokes, so it's probably okay"

"I remember fondly the time an audience member asked the Go team "why did you choose to ignore any research about type systems since the 1970s"? (Emphasis his, not mine)

"It doesn't matter who points out that "maybe we shouldn't hit ourselves in the head with a rake repeatedly""

"Or you can be horrified, as you realize that those complex problems only exist because Go is being used."

"you adopted a language that happened by accident" (a direct criticism at Go users)

"Evidently, the Go team didn't want to design a language."

"Because it needed to be familiar to "Googlers, fresh out of school, who probably learned some Java/C/C++/Python" (Rob Pike, Lang NEXT 2014), it borrowed from all of these."

I just gave up here. Do you really think a production conversation can start from this? ESR has flamed less haughtily.

I'd choose Node or PHP over Go for a greenfield project. (Although I can't think of a case where I'd choose them over Python.) All of those languages at least give me an FFI escape hatch in case I need it that isn't absolutely horrendous, both from a dev experience standpoint and a performance standpoint.

Yeah, preach. I wrote Go professionally for a couple of years, and I write Python now (I know, I know, but they pay me a ridiculous amount to do it). I would choose almost anything, including JS, over Go. It's a good language if you need to write highly concurrent high-level code with low-skill devs, but not for much else, and even then it requires an inordinate amount of menial boilerplate work to get simple stuff done. Having said that, I would still choose it – indeed anything - over Python.

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