False humility is a form of egotism; every stated upside of Go can be equally construed as a paternalistic concession to our general failure to produce capable programmers, let alone at a sufficient volume to fulfill Google’s commercial ambitions that require the production of Lots Of Code.

I’ve always associated Go as something that swooped in on Python, Ruby and Node.js to offer an alternative that is much faster out of the gate and far more approachable as C/C++/Java. This continues to be true from my experience and I think Go succeeds at this even with some of its well documented rough edges.

Didn't expect to get insulted for not using golang despite it not having a compelling use case for my needs. But here we are.

there’s two types of programmers:

- those who’ve worked with go fulltime for a few months

- those who haven’t

looking back at the go i wrote in my first weeks after dropping python, it is very different from the code i write now.

go is imperfect, but fantastic. hard to hold any other view without being in the latter category.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41641324

Every golang programmer I've worked with doesn't fit the bill of "small ego".

That's maybe a bit... thick. Fewer commercial ambitions?

The entire point of Go is to be the Java of Google, the language you don't need several weeks of training for to be productive in and start reading and writing code.

Java's problem is that it doesn't do this well for anything but heavy business logic applications, and the more clever the programmer, the more they can build up complex structures. Go counters this by not having complex structures and forcing you to consider every failure case (at least until writing "if err != nil" becomes second nature) while also having a better (but not perfect) API surface for writing the kinds of applications important at Google (network heavy, distributed systems, performance focused).