1) Our industry is obsessed with new and shiny.

2) There are a lot of developers and companies who don't have the time to invest in a new paradigm or language.

3) By learning/using golang these developers and companies can look "hip" and forward thinking with minimal effort.

With a Java background and a 10 hour investment in golang you can write decent software.

With a 10 hour investment in Haskell you can't do anything.

While you might think it's worth spending 100+ hours learning Haskell, I don't (at the moment) have any reason to Haskell as a better time investment than anything else on that list.. why should I give it more than 10 hours?

So while I'd love to write big chunks of Haskell, if its just me doing it, that code will be nuked and rewritten unless I also undertake a project of education. So accessibility is key. Go/python/js seem to win in that regard, and likewise in access to libraries.

So unless as an organisation there is motivation to step up skilling, e.g. because there is a lot of money at stake if something breaks (e.g. trading software), or because there is a community of practice (compilers) its hard to see Haskell gaining much ground.

Likewise all those other languages has their niche, and it is hard to seem them displacing each other.

This happens in hiring practices, in programming languages, in infrastructure tech, in data tech, etc.

It's extremely rare to encounter a data scale problem that actually requires a Hadoop-ish deployment, but they're all over the place. It's extremely rare to encounter an ops infrastructure that requires a scale and complexity where Kubernetes-ish tools make sense, but they're all over the place.

I admittedly don't fully understand the point of Go (as in existentially). I have used it, and will assuredly have to keep using it based on its increasing popularity. But it's not as good as Erlang for reliability or supporting production tools (services use cases). It's not as good as Rust or Haskell for implementation assurance (safety/security use cases). It's not as good for numerical processing as Julia or Fortran (scientific/performance use cases).

It feels a lot like the next generation of Java to me.

In that it's some shape of "good enough". And when "good enough" is combined with the cachet of aligning oneself with Google's ecosystem, it's basically unstoppable.

It's a pretty close to pure expression of a few language designer's vision, with very little in the way of corporate influence (that I can discern). And, I think that's the point of Go; it's the language its designers wanted for the tasks they wanted to work on (web scale services). It just happens that a lot of people want/need to work on the same sort of thing.

I agree that most people embracing massive scale are doing so way too early and probably aint gonna need it. But, that doesn't mean Go isn't a useful tool, anyway. I've watched a few videos, and read a few tutorials, and the brevity of Go for things like network servers is breathtaking. The cleverness of interfaces is...well, it really has to be seen to be understood. It's not OO, it's not functional. It's...something else. Contrary to the impression that maybe I've given in other comments, Go does have some features that aren't commonly seen elsewhere (or, if they are, they're bolted on). It has some fancy features, but only a few, and only in specific areas.

It seems like a very well thought out language, to me. Which might have been true of Java in its very early days...I'm not sure. I've never really been a Java developer, though I've read some Java code now and then.

So, Go might be merely "good enough" on some fronts, but I think it's great on a few specific fronts. And, it does it without requiring total buy-in on a new paradigm, which is probably its killer feature. It looks a little like Python or whatever in syntax, but acts a little like Erlang on a few specific details. Pretty good combination, and the community seems to agree.

[0] https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponenti...

Well, Google doesn't put as much money into Go either (as MS and Sun put into Java and C#). Sun and C# had much bigger teams, much bigger budgets, and tons of marketing money spent on them, including actual ads everywhere. Just the team writing the C# documentation was probably bigger than the whole Google Go team.

But that's relative:

Unlike most OSS/community driven languages (e.g. Nim or Julia), Go has a big enough team that's paid to work on Go. That makes a difference.