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Comment by codr7 | Hacker News Reader

I don't find it weird at all that simpler languages are more popular/successful.

They're easier to pick up and support the idea of plug and play programmers that is very popular among managers.

Productive as a consequence of the above, maybe; in that more code is written in Go; but certainly not as a quality of the language.

And there's numbness and denial involved. I've been writing Go full time for about a year now at work. Every time I use another language I'm reminded of how much time and energy I'm wasting.

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It's not even that it's popular among managers to move people around all the time. That's an awful framework for getting great work done.

People change jobs and you need to choose a language you can either easily hire for or train someone up in. Go fits the second requirement very well, and as more people learn it, starts hitting on the first. I introduced Go at two different companies to great success not because it's my favorite language (I would much prefer Rust, Haskell, Clojure, etc) but in reality, in my role as a leader of a tech org, hiring smart people and getting giving them the means to be productive as soon as possible for however long they want to work with us is key.

Is being productive immediately better than a constant loss of productivity due to manual boilerplate writing?

It seems to me to be the wrong trade

Depends on a number of factors. I think GitHub copilot is reducing that trade off a bit more. If the average dev stays somewhere for 2.5 years (our average is quite a bit higher because I tend to think we’re good place to work) - how long are you willing to invest in them learning the new tech (and on top of the, business logic/etc)? The lower the investment number the less you’re willing to dive into rust sans specific technical reasons (which go and elixir would easily meet).

Separately, I don’t buy the notion that a language that has a bit more boilerplate is less productive than one with virtually none.

This is all from a managers perspective, which I suspect is the main reason we disagree.

From a coders perspective, using sub-optimal tools and churning out boilerplate day in and day out makes the difference between keeping a job and looking elsewhere.

Which turns it into a managers problem, because if your developers are not happy, you won't be either in the long run.

> I don't find it weird at all that simpler languages are more popular/successful.

There are diminishing returns on programming features I guess. At a certain level of complexity the difficulty in learning the feature will kill adoption despite the usefulness of the feature - e.g. monads; after months I think I sort of get it ... sort of.

> Every time I use another language I'm reminded of how much time and energy I'm wasting.

Wasting writing Go or wasting writing in the other language? Sorry, just clarifying. I really can't tell which you meant.

Wasting writing Go, definitely.

Manual loop implementations of basic functional concepts, manual error propagation, finding ways around arbitrary limitations in the name of simplicity, the list goes on and on.

Yeah agreed, especially on the error propagation part. Its especially egregious when trying to send results through channels, I just wish I had the Result enum from rust every time.

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