[atx42]

I think Go and Angular should have died, and would already be footnotes in programming history if they had not been introduced by Google. Let's make procedural programming great again? I get it, you can compile it and it has concurrency, but there's better alternatives in my mind, unfortunately not as popular.

[bloblaw]

Go is successful because it has many appealing features:

  1. trivial cross-compilation
  2. native multi-threading (eg no GIL or multi-process hacks) that is easy to take advantage of
  3. fast. An order of magnitude faster than Python in many cases.
  4. easy to deploy. Most often just a single binary

I like Go because once I compile it, I can ship that binary anywhere and it will run. I like Python for a great number of tasks and for prototyping, but I prefer Go when I need to run my code on another machine (or it needs to be fast).

To put it simply, with Go I ship a binary. With Python I have to ship my entire development environment.

[didibus]

Ya, and if you look at the language space, there's nothing else that offers #1.

That set of features isn't related to the language itself (though the language was designed to allow those features).

This is where Go is appealing, it's not the language itself, it's the properties it brings with it. Cross-compilation, multi-spec, reasonable performance and low memory footprint. Single binaries. And I'd add fast compilation times.

Honestly it needs more competition that offers those same properties, because I'd love to have more choice of language (syntax + semantics), but get the same properties. But for now, you have to use Golang if you want something that gives you all those properties and that's just where Golang differentiates itself.

[snapetom]

The two things I always bring up in interviews on why I like Go:

1) Easy to use pointers. There's just pointers, not like C where you can have anywhere from 4 to 8 different types depending on your platform. And no, pass by reference vs. value are not the same as pointers.

2) Very simple to use concurrency.

[kaba0]

1. VM-targeting languages have even more trivial cross-compilation, like you even get a single .jar file 2. There are hundreds of languages like that 3. It’s not too hard to be faster than python - Java, C#, JS are all in the same ballpark as Go (and for more complex programs some can often surpass it due to the much better GC-implementations) 4. Very very slightly easier than the above mentioned bunch. But with Java’s stellar backwards compatibility record you pretty much just has to have a big enough JVM version and that’s it.

[wiz21c]

How fast is it compared to rust ? Do you know.

I ask because I've started a side project in rust because all of its guarantees were appealing to me (I don't want to spend too much time on bugs, and my code uses some threads). I also need maximum performances. So I've chosen it. But now I have my compilation times that reach 45 seconds, so I'm slowly wondering if the go balance (towards fast compilation) would not be more advantageous; unless of course, performances are real bad...

[Xeoncross]

For a lot of people like me, Go was something of a better scripting language.

It wasn't as hard to grok as C or Rust, it wasn't as slow as Ruby, Python or PHP. most of all, it it was designed to make use of multiple cores. Surprisingly, having testing and formatting built into the tooling is also a huge win after spending years debating and changing choices in scripting land.

Go is the new PHP/Node.js and Rust is the replacement for everything else. I know this is technically wrong, but that's how it feels.

[tech_tuna]

Agreed 100%. I've used a bunch of languages over the years: C, C++, C#, VB, Perl, Java/Groovy/Kotlin, Javascript, Lua, Ruby, PHP, Python and Go. All fairly mainstream and I'm not going to start railing on the ones I don't like. . . so let's just say Python was the first language that I loved and Go is my current favorite.

For me, readability, simplicity and having compile time checks are wonderful. Go feels like a better Python. I still enjoy using Python but "runtime is funtime" even with type hinting and linting and everything else.

I am also a sucker for good tooling and a pleasant dev experience. Go has fantastic tooling. That being said, it has its warts and weak points. If I need to write something quick and dirty, I prefer Python. If I need to parse JSON and I don't have an easy way to generate client code, I prefer Python.

There are some quirky bits in Go I don't particularly like e.g. the reversal of parameter type and name in function signatures. . . that just confuses me because I typically am using 2-4 different languages in any given week and Go is the weirdo in this regard. :)

I would be thrilled to see Rust become the dominant systems programming language some day. I'm planning to learn it as soon as it looks like the right choice for me - for most of my work, Python + Go + bash (I love and hate bash) are more than sufficient.

[crowdyriver]

My feelings exactly. I love go because of how productive and resilient can be. In months programming in it I've barely had any null pointer exceptions. If it compiles, and passes the linters, it mostly works aswell.

[hnov]

Go is incredibly productive. Its primitive type system keeps me from bikeshedding, the standard library mostly makes sense, builds are fast, and yes, the builtin asynchronous IO means that I can write a C10K server without even trying. No JVM, no choosing between libuv and libevent, literally just take the simplicity of the fork-per-request model and adapt it to modernity.

[umvi]

Procedural programming has always been great and continues to be great for most use cases. There's a time and a place for OOP, and there is a case to be made for functional programming, but it's hard to beat the simplicity of procedural programming. Go is an excellent procedural language that has lots of static guarantees and a super fast compile times (fast at least compared to C++).

[kaba0]

I really would not call it “lots of static guarantees”.. it has some static guarantees at most. It is pretty low in type safety, compared to even C++ and the like, let alone Rust, Haskell, etc.

[josephcsible]

Indeed. My overall complaint about Go is that despite being a very new programming language, it hasn't incorporated a lot of lessons learned long ago (e.g., the billion dollar mistake). One of my favorite articles about Go is http://cowlark.com/2009-11-15-go/

[hnov]

As a PL Golang is very unremarkable and it does have a lot of special casing and a general lack of "orthogonality," in fact it reminds me of PHP in some ways.

However, that's completely missing the point: Golang brought CSP into the mainstream when most were still using CPS to scale beyond OS threads. The kind of people who rewrite services to get performance improvements and then write blog posts about it aren't gonna learn your complicated language (just like they're not gonna spend their time messing with gevent and profiling to scale their python): they're makers not PL researchers. Google rightly noticed that there's a huge gap between existing mainstream offerings on the ease of use-performance spectrum and filled it with a DSL for programming network services. It doesn't need to be fancy, it needs to allow someone with CS201 knowledge to set-up the codebase so that people with CS101 knowledge can write sequential code that talks to the network without callbacks, yield/async/await or any of that incidental cruft.

[coin]

Could not agree more. Using Go is like stepping in a time machine and going back to 2005.

[KronisLV]

What's wrong with Angular? It being largely "batteries included" seemed pretty nice and I really liked the fact that TypeScript was a first class citizen - React and Vue both feel like it's been kind of tacked on, especially when a lot of additional libraries out there don't really have proper bindings.

That said, personally I also think that React kind of went downhill for a bit due to the hooks (after seeing a few projects become really nightmarish to debug due to render loops without clear causes for them, after people sprinkled one too many hooks in there).

Oh, and the Vue 2 to 3 migration is also a bit problematic because still many UI component libraries haven't been migrated over - currently actually using PrimeVue on a project because BootstrapVue still doesn't have proper support https://github.com/bootstrap-vue/bootstrap-vue/issues/5196

[gosukiwi]

No matter how hard I try, I just can't like React. I prefer Angular, Vue, even Ember. React feels like a downgrade to me.

[akira2501]

I have yet to find a language where cross compiling is as easy and simple as it is with Go. It's a first class feature of the language and for my use case, it makes it an obvious choice.

Programming is about managing tradeoffs to solve real problems, not building a perfect ideological environment to write code in.

[pkulak]

I can't think of anything off the top of my head that doesn't require a runtime, but does exclusively use green threads.

[BipolarCapybara]

What do you feel is a good alternative to Go?

[bloblaw]

Depends on your requirements. If you want statically compiled (AOT compiled), then I think Nim, Zig, or even Rust are good alternatives.

If you like the high-performance backend, then Java, Kotlin, Scala, or C# are great choices.

[uhtred]

Go should have died?! didn't Go come out like yesterday? This is why I am hesitant to invest time in new hot thing languages. I swear in 20 years everything important will still be written in C, PHP, Perl, C#, Java, Python (how could I forget JavaScript).

[bloblaw]

Go was released in 2009, which is 13 years ago. Many companies have built significant portions of their stacks on top of Go....Twitch, Google, Uber, Lyft, Amazon, etc.

It's widely used in industry and isn't going anywhere.

[KronisLV]

> Go should have died?! didn't Go come out like yesterday? This is why I am hesitant to invest time in new hot thing languages.

Actually it came out about 10 years ago, in one way or another: https://go.dev/doc/devel/release So it largely depends on what timescales you're comfortable with - some people switch stacks or learn new tech every 3-5 years, for others this cycle is slower or faster, also depending on the stuff you're working with.

I'd say that web dev moves quickly, embedded moves more slowly, the rest is somewhere in the middle for the most part, maybe AI/ML and certain DevOps aspects rival web dev speeds of innovation/churn.

> I swear in 20 years everything important will still be written in C, PHP, Perl, C#, Java, Python (how could I forget JavaScript).

Perhaps, i think languages like Rust will be pretty widespread, both in the Linux kernel, as well as many tools and whatnot, albeit in a different and perhaps more conservative fashion than currently (the "rewrite everything in Rust" craze). In contrast, most of the modern web based SaaS solutions will be dead, most certainly the majority of Kubernetes tooling out there.

Go might just be boring and useful enough to stick around and join the dreadful bunch of languages used in maintaining legacy code. It's funny, though, because while the languages themselves are more usable than they were 10 years ago, people's sentiments (including mine) are largely influenced by how many bad codebases they have to maintain: https://earthly.dev/blog/brown-green-language/

On an unrelated note, it would be pretty cool to have extremely slowly moving and stable languages, projects and tooling out there. To see maybe 3 or 4 releases in my entire lifetime and to have the next generation take over the burden. Then again, seeing how COBOL and FORTRAN are now, perhaps that sense of grandeur isn't worth the effort and old projects should just die.

[gnulinux]

> I swear in 20 years everything important will still be written in C, PHP, Perl, C#, Java, Python (how could I forget JavaScript).

Hmm all the languages you listed have certain niches that I think will likely remain alive in the next 20 years, except I don't think Perl deserves this spot. I think anything Perl is a great fit at, Python will also be a great fit and (subjectively) python code ends up being strictly more readable than perl.

I would guess PHP also has a similar relationship to Python but the effect, I believe, is a lot milder as PHP shops seem to be more decisive about sticking with PHP. All evidence anecdotal of course.

[dgb23]

There is plenty of important stuff written in this generation's languages like Go, Clojure, Rust, Typescript and so on. You might be relying on some of them.

[joebob42]

I think it should have died when it came out. Javas way older but I'd rather use that.

[geodel]

Well those alternatives can be popular if more people find them better. Isn't it?

[simonw]

What's better than procedural programming?

[tnzk]

I assume he implied functinal programming.