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Comment by lnanek2 | Hacker News Reader

As a cloud platform startup, I'm kind of surprised they didn't just go with NodeJS due to it's huge popularity advantage meaning they'd have many more customers. Even investors are asking for it nowadays. If you are writing internal software for your own company, OK, pick what you want. But if you are building a cloud platform that will presumably have customers with their own wants/needs/demands/codebases, I think they would have been better off with a platform written in the same language and engineers steeped in the same language as everyone wants right now.

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I'm not familiar with their product, is their back-end choice going to limit their customers?

I think that a lot of developers that didn't start with front-end work find Javascript disgusting, maybe this team is in that group. When I worked at a consulting firm (that used a lot of C#) and we talked about node.js when it came out, everyone agreed they hated the idea of having to write more yucky JS than they had too. I think node.js was high on hype for a while and is less loved (esp outside of CA) than you might expect.

I've ported node.js apps to Go 1.0.1 and even back then the result was better performing, used less memory, about the same LOC and IMHO much cleaner, straight-forward and maintainable code.

I think they a lot of developers that didn't start with front-end work find Javascript disgusting, maybe this team is in that group.

I am not a Javascript fanboy, but the syntax of GoLang is not better either.

I disagree, Go is slightly more verbose, but it leads to very clear code that is easily understood. Go code is beautiful.

Javascript's dynamic typing, extensive use of callbacks, its approach to OO, inconsistent braces and semicolons, etc are all felt by a lot of people to be messy.

For me lack of something like gofmt and a compile time errors also greatly detract.

Reading this at the top of the comments made me really sad.

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