The number of strongly typed garbage collected compiled languages is surely shrinking. I can understand someone's disgust towards Java considering dwindling velocity in adding next-gen features and now sleeping in same bed as lawyer run Oracle. That pretty much had left C# in the arena until Go came on the scene. I was honestly hoping Go would give us head-to-head battle with C# but
from initial looks Go pretty much feels like C# 1.0. No generics, no partial classes, no linq... C# 5.0 even has async and dynamic types. I like minimalism but these features are something we take for granted in languages that were created post-2000 era. So it all boils down to people choosing Go for singular reason: It's not from Microsoft! If licensing for C# wasn't a barrier and let's stretch our imagination by thinking C# was created by some other group in Google, would Go have a chance?
I'd take a second look at Go. It has a number of innovations over C# - and of course also a number of shortcomings. It's quite a different language, much more so than Java compared to C# (1.0 even).
A couple of things of the top of my head:
* goroutines and efficient multithreading, both in terms of syntactical constructs and language implementation. Go doesn't have await/async because it fundamentally doesn't need them.
* a type system that works without inheritance or subtypes but rather static duck typing, quite different from any other language
* very memory efficient layout of data structures, internal pointers
* small set of builtins with maps, slices, channels (that do have 'generic' types for their members) to reuse, rather than re-implement
* comes with a well designed build and packaging system
* comes with a very convincing standard library
It's worth taking a look. C# surely is a nice language, but it inherited many of the design flaws of Java, in particular with respect to the runtime and memory layout. Google does use Java internally a lot, Go gets uptake in spite of that competition.
Regardless of language merits, licensing C# can indeed be a problem, as can be the operational complexity of managing Windows running on hundreds, thousands, ten thousands etc of machines.
* Their implementation sucks so much that most decently built
concurrency implementation will beat Go-routines by a wide
margin. Just have a look at all those people on the Go mailing
list whining about the scheduler. Not even talking about the
fact that building concurrency mechanisms into the language is
plain stupid. We all saw how well that worked out in plenty of
other languages before.
* You know why pretty much no one uses structural typing?
It's not because the “brilliant” designers of Go “invented” it,
it's because most language designers realized that it is a poor
idea before shipping the language. I think it is pretty telling
that in languages which support both nominal and structural
typing pretty much nobody is using structural typing.
* I'm not seeing how a language which requires passing around
void* pointers in every data-structure and casting at pretty
much every corner can be considered memory efficient.
* Hard-coding collection classes with special cased syntax into
the language, so that everyone who needs to have something
slightly different is completely fucked ... what is this? 1980?
* Their packaging system is an unmitigated failure. Nuff' said.
* Do they have a working Unicode implementation yet (I mean more
than the “We use UTF8 for strings ... which is like 0.5% of
what Unicode is about”)? What about (Big)Decimal? A working
date/calendar abstraction which isn't a terrible joke?
Take his criticism (not sure it even merits that title) with a grain of salt. Many people on HN and on the mailing list have sung the praises of Go's packaging system.
Yet another Go fanboy getting a bit defensive without having to add anything constructive?
If you actually checked your “claims” you would see that people are singing so many praises that the mailing list is continually filled with proposals to fix the worst parts of Go's packaging system.
Your post has no substance, other than to say some people on the mailing list don't like it. But other people on the mailing list do like it. So your post is meaningless and useless.
If you actually have problems with Go's packaging, and care about it enough to write as much as you have, why didn't you simply point out the flaws?
> Because there are already dozens of people who did that already?
Do you really expect people to scour a newsgroup to find the meaning of your vague and unsubstantiated claims?
Someone could similarly say "Scala is an unmitigated failure of a language. If you want to know why, just track down its detractors on the Internet. There are dozens." Would you be impressed by that?
The C# and the Go cultures are very different. Culture is a big part of what makes programming languages different.
Python and Ruby are basically the same language, but the culture of the users is very different and so the libraries and tool are quite different.
Go is from the unixy C culture, C# is from the Java/win32 culture and the libraries and tools reflect that.
This isn't a fair statement. A better statement would be "Go would be hardly mentioned here if it weren't for all of the effort and documentation put into it." There is no doubt though that Go would not be moving along so quickly if it weren't for Google, but I think this is a case of 'correlation is not causation.' Dart comes from Google also, and while I see it from time to time here, nowhere like I do Go.
Myself, I tend to trust and prefer Mozilla as a company more. That said, I find Rust not only unusable, but really too big of a language. I find Go the perfect mix of features I desire, and I cannot be the only one. So, I like Go as a community and as language and certainly not because Google is behind it.
Go seems to be gaining traction. Does it matter if that's because of where it came from? Maybe in a cultural, I-want-to-think-about-why-some-languages-get-adopted sense, sure, then it can matter. And I think it's worth having those discussions. But I get the impression that people think there's some absolute injustice in the idea that people are adopting a language, and it's partly because it's from Google. Consider:
"Yes, C would be hardly mentioned here if it wasn't being developed at Bell Labs."
Java as a platform is absolutely not dwindling in velocity. All that is happening is people are looking into alternative JVM languages like Scala, Clojure and Groovy. This trend has been happening for a while and is as much to do with Servlets/Spring as it is with Java the language. It has absolutely nothing to do with Oracle which has been a fantastic steward for the platform.
I don't think you actually have much understanding of enterprise environments otherwise you would know how ridiculous the idea that Go or C# is going to take over from Java anytime soon.
