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Comment by kabdib | Hacker News Reader

Recent-ish experience:

- Wrote a distributed app in Python (it aggregated a few GB / day of info from several thousand servers). Performance was terrible, though I was doing all the right things (async I/O, etc.).

- Rewrote it in Go. That worked really well, and took just a few days. But management freaked out, forbade Go in engineering, and so:

- Spent several months rewriting the whole thing in C++. What a fucking misery. Just getting HTTPS working was a depressing experience. Package manager? No, you get to trawl the internet for semi-busted projects that sorta kinda maybe work, and then bend them to fit.

Go is the sweet spot between "Python isn't fast enough and never will be" and having to reinvent the wheel in C++.

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Did you have prior Go experience to the rewrite? My experiences line up with this quite closely, similar tasks are much better suited to Go, concurrency management is night and day vs Python. But Go can seem scary to folks without previous experience and that turns lots of folks off - even though the language and syntax don't feel _that_ different and there is a similar batteries included approach, though Go's batteries are generally better.

Management forbade the use of Go? But they allow both Python and C++? So their rationale for forbidding Go is... what?

Is this just cluelessness and management by familiarity with buzzwords?

Heh, imagine you have 8 C++ programmers, then one rewrites some critical piece in Go ... and then leaves. Now you have to find a go programmer (from a much smaller pool). How do you find a good one? It's not going to be easy without some good Go developers on the interview panel. Say you hire one, he goes on vacation for 2 weeks, something important breaks and you need a 2nd go programmer, etc.

I have a bit of a different take on this.

They mentioned it was a rewrite that happened in a couple of days in a shop that uses C++ and Python (at least). We can assume it was a small to medium utility program.

Someone who can write C++ and Python professionally will get up to speed with Go in a few days. This shouldn't be a hiring issue. The cost of rewriting it again in C++ can easily be higher and apparently was a huge PITA. Go is not some obscure language, it is literally designed to be accessible by anyone with basic programming experience.

As a programmer I agree, but as management that's a hard thing to tell. If you were the boss would you allow Lisp? Scheme? Erlang? It sounded like a pretty important piece of code, even if small. The complaints about being forced to do C++ and how painful that process was shows that it's at least non-trivial.

I disagree. If you're managing programmers, you might be expected to have a bit of a clue about programming languages. If you can't tell how easy it would be for your people to pick up Go versus how easy it would be to pick up Lisp, you have no business managing programmers.

Well you can still manage programmers but you certainly shouldn't micromanage their technological choices then.

You can argue about whether enforcing language consistency across an organization is a good idea or not, but it isn't "micromanagement".

> But management freaked out, forbade Go in engineering

It pains me to read this, especially since Go seems to be a language that is extremely easy to adopt.

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