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Comment by eva1984 | Hacker News Reader

eva1984·

Just curious though, I have seem quite a number of posts in the past year mentioned the switch from Node to Go, is there a pattern here?Why Go in particular?

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Go appears to have a similar kind of momentum behind it as Node had/has. It's a small and "familiar" language, so devs pick it up easily, and has a healthy open-source package ecosystem.

It could also just be random chance. People and communities latch onto things for all sorts of reasons.

> Why Go in particular?

Its the new shiny thing.

I think go and node are more or less of the same "age" and "shininess"?

EDIT: Very much so, they were actually released to the public in 2009.

Ruby was first released in the mid 90s and became the shiny new thing in around 2005 when ten years old.

Sometimes the shiny newness is in the public eye rather than absolute terms.

Not really, Ruby ON RAILS became the shiny new thing, and was released in 2005.

because you can be productive in go in a couple weeks, whereas you will have spend a couple months w/ java/scala/erlang before you are productive.

That's a bold assertion. I don't see any reason why Go would be easier to pick up than Java. Scala, sure, maybe then as it's a much more complex and powerful language.

But a few years ago I effectively had to start re-learning Java from scratch (I knew the language but the whole ecosystem had moved on from when I first learned it), and it certainly didn't take months to get productive.

It is good at concurrency which makes it attractive to those coming from node.

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