Re:Rob Pike on the reasons for Go’s success
by jchw on Thursday October 31, 2019 @01:26PM
(#21411321)
I understand this line of logic, but are you suggesting you’d get the same approval to use, say, Dart?
(I am not talking down Dart - I think it’s underrated. But it’s a good counter example to the “it’s Google so it’s OK” logic. I suspect people say Google is the reason Go is OK even when it’s actually more word of mouth.)
Re:Rob Pike on the reasons for Go’s success
by skohan on Thursday October 31, 2019 @01:54PM
(#21411664)
I think it's always a mix of things which lead to the success of any language ecosystem. I think Go has at least 3 things going for it:
1. It got the *initial push* from its Google pedigree which allowed it to gain attention and traction
2. It meets the *merit threshold* so that when people gave it a try, they wanted to continue using it
3. It had a good *product market fit*: in the world where Go was released, *a lot* of server-side software was being written in scripting languages and there was a clear value proposition for a fast, compiled, statically typed language with good tooling for handing server work.
I think that's why something like React or Typescript could really explode in that space: they could be added incrementally to a project while still keeping most things familiar.
There are dozens of interesting languages out there. D, for example, seems like an interesting language, and I would love to try it out in a professional project. But if I wanted to use D at work, it would probably take weeks of convincing my team to try it in production. Go already seems like a safe choice, largely because of the "seal of approval" granted to it as coming from a tech giant like Google.