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Comment by beeworker | Hacker News Reader

Just about everything is better than Go. Nim, Rust, OCaml, Haskell... Did you read the submission? And for further enlightenment, the link to the previous post on the blog about what makes Nim special? Here's a link to a rant comparing Go and Rust, which includes some links of its own highlighting further issues with Go: http://www.quora.com/How-do-Go-and-Rust-languages-compare

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I like to think of Go as a niche language with excellent tooling for small-medium microservices and various forms of networking clients and servers. When you look at it in that light, it's not a bad language. It's an okay language missing a lot of features (many based on good intentions, some due to what I consider poor design) that could make it a good language.

Rust is objectively much better, but I suspect that for the next 5 years, Rust will only remain popular for systems programming but not application/web dev, and Go will only remain popular for what it's currently doing but not systems programming (with some semi-exceptions like Docker and Kubernetes, though that's not really systems programming).

I've read both the submission and the articles that exist inside that Quora link you posted and I am still not convinced. IMO what makes a language better is end products and not features. When Rust becomes stable, its community will produce great software but I don't think all of the rest languages you mentioned have produced (or will do) better software than Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift, etcd, btcd, and a ton of other Go software.

> IMO what makes a language better is end products and not features.

It's useful to distinguish between "the language" and "the tool". Some programming languages are terrible from a language design perspective (PHP, JavaScript, MATLAB), but they still have great tools (IDEs, build tools, package managers) and libraries to help programmers create good and interesting software.

The tooling around Go is good but not that great. What makes Go better than all those languages is that it's more complete: a language that does not get into your feet, good tooling, great community, and more. IMHO saying that a language is better or worse based only on "the language" is silly.

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