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Comment by codeka | Hacker News Reader

When I look at the Google Trends for "golang", China is the top region by a huge margin (the next highest region after China is Sweden at 30) [ http://i.imgur.com/XHW40kp.png ].

And the rise of interest in "golang" in general seems to correspond to the massive spike in China [ http://i.imgur.com/Y3oO2jf.png ].

I'm not really sure what that means...

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Could just be false signals for people googling "Go" the game and not the language. Golang is the first search on a generic search for "Go" (https://www.google.com.hk/webhp?hl=zh-CN&sa=N&tab=lw#hl=zh-C...).

People in China that are searching for the game would probably be searching for "weiqi" or "围棋". "Go" comes from the Japanese word for the game, "igo".

Also, in my experience, very few (mainland) Chinese play weiqi. Everyone plays Chinese chess, but very few play Go. So people searching for "go" are quite likely searching for the language. (Although I'd expect that the people who know about the language know enough to search for "golang", so who knows)

Go is quite popular in China, especially on Windows. I'm not sure of the reasons for that, but Rob Pike and Andrew Gerrand do mention it in this interview on the ChangeLog: http://thechangelog.com/100/

A lot of webgame companies use Go, because of its performance in concurrency.

Perhaps people mispelling "Gobang" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gomoku

China is the world's most populous country, with a population of over 1.35 billion. That's 19% of the world population.

The population itself doesn't matter that much. According to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_China#Poverty_reduct... ~950 million live on less than 5$ per day. I doubt you can get a decent PC and a decent Internet connection on that kind of money. I'd bet that the US has more programmers than China right now, even though China has 4x the population.

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