This requires you to squint so that "popular" happens to identify only a handful of languages but conveniently catches Go and not say Swift or Rust. It's not difficult to do this, but it's not very honest to yourself.
- TIOBE [0]: Go 7 :: Rust n/a (> 10)
- IEEE Spectrum [1]: Go 8 :: Rust 11
- Stack Overflow [2]: Go 13 :: Rust 14 (they're pretty close here)
- GitHub [3]: Go 10 :: Rust n/a (> 10)
- PYPL [4]: Go 12 :: Rust 10
- HackerRank [5]: Go 8 :: Rust n/a (> 13)
- Pluralsight [6]: Go 9 :: Rust n/a (> 10)
- Redmonk [7]: Go 12 :: Rust 19
Although I admit we probably don't have great measures of this, there's clearly a sizable gap here.
Maybe you'd want to argue about TypeScript, Swift or Kotlin? I consider TypeScript JavaScript (because TypeScript wouldn't be popular unless all JavaScript programs were TypeScript programs), and I think Swift and Kotlin only survive because of their mobile platforms (they're also all below Go in these lists, on average).
[0]: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
[1]: https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages-2024
[2]: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology
[3]: https://github.blog/news-insights/octoverse/octoverse-2024/#...
[4]: https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html
[5]: https://www.hackerrank.com/blog/most-popular-languages-2024/
[6]: https://www.pluralsight.com/resources/blog/upskilling/top-pr...
[7]: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/06/18/language-rankings-1-2...
The claim made was "Go is the only popular modern language (ie from this millennium)"
That's a binary, either a programming language is "modern" (from this millennium) or not and either it is "popular" (undefined) or it is not, Go is popular and modern according to the claim.
On your lists you find Go is anywhere from 7th to 13th in popularity. So apparently "popular" might mean 9th like Ada on TIOBE's list right? Or maybe "modern" includes Typescript, on several of these lists?
No, the whole contrivance is silly. Go is a relatively popular modern language, nobody is surprised to discover that. Is it the most popular? No. Is it the most modern? Also no.
>> This requires you to squint so that "popular" happens to identify only a handful of languages but conveniently catches Go and not say Swift or Rust. It's not difficult to do this, but it's not very honest to yourself.
> You seem to be arguing that Go is more popular than Rust, but that's not what we're talking about.
Isn't this exactly what we're talking about? I don't think you have to squint too hard to invent the gap between Go and Rust (et al).
> So apparently "popular" might mean 9th like Ada on TIOBE's list right?
No because it's only on that list.
> Or maybe "modern" includes Typescript, on several of these lists?
No because TypeScript is JavaScript, which is from the last millennium.
> No, the whole contrivance is silly.
Emotionally I agree with you, but in practice you gotta pick a stack, and there's a lot of benefit to choosing Go over Rust/Kotlin/Swift/TypeScript/Java/C#/C/C++/Ada.
> Go is a relatively popular modern language, nobody is surprised to discover that.
Eh I'm making the Stroustrup "there's two kinds of programming languages" argument. IMO, at this point Go criticisms are just jeers from the cheap seats.
So, if you don't count the lists where it isn't in the top ten, and you don't count languages like Typescript? Does that feel like an important distinction to you with the exceptions, rather than an arbitrary post doc justification ?
> Isn't this exactly what we're talking about? I don't think you have to squint too hard to invent the gap between Go and Rust (et al).
Likewise for Go and Python or Javas, so why the "top 10" ? Arbitrary.
> TypeScript is JavaScript
No. Javascript is (very bad) Typescript, but Typescript is not Javascript. That's why they have a transpiler.
If you contend that the similarity means they're the same language that makes C++ also C and I don't think you want to start that fight.
My pithy response to the Stroustrup argument is a T-shirt I own which says "Haters gonna make some good points". Yes of course people will criticize your popular language, but this observation does not make the criticisms untrue, and resorting to Stroustrup's argument is best understood as an admission that he has no response to the actual criticism.
C++ is remarkably bad. You're looking at popularity lists. What else is on those lists which has similar levels of criticism? Go is a long way short of perfect but it's nowhere close to C++. If Go is the Stallone "Judge Dredd" then maybe C++ is "Batman & Robin".
I feel like we both understand each other at this point so I'll ask because I'm curious, what languages are you into? I'd really like a chance to dig into Erlang, OCaml, or Racket, but I can never really justify it. Mostly I'm a boring C/Python person (believe it or not, I don't like Go all that much)
I currently get paid to write, among other things, C#, Python, PHP, Perl, and bash. Historically I have also been paid to write C, Java, and Go, among other things.
In contrast "Batman & Robin" is terrible. Clooney said he didn't want friends and family to see it because he is rightfully ashamed to have done it. Sometimes an actor does good work but it's hard to see because the technicians are incompetent and the editor destroys their effort in the cut - however it's clear Clooney was not trying.
Alicia Silverstone has been in utter trash, some of which I have watched because I used to live with a guy who was obsessed with her - but it's notable that even the icky "technically this isn't pornography" stuff she did as a teenager is more competent than "Batman & Robin" for which she was presumably much better paid.
Joel Schumacher can do excellent work so why is "Batman & Robin" so awful? Did the Studio tell him nothing else matters so long as the branding is there because comic book fans will show up anyway? If so maybe it's partly their fault, but a good artist should have more pride in their own work than to do this.
I have more recently (well, this century) gone to a "live MST3K" type event where they screen the original film but talk over it. They warned us that "Batman & Robin" is too awful for this format to save it, but I didn't listen and yeah, long before the closing credits lots of people walked out because they were right and it's unsalvageable.
I actually lived near a movie theater that got bought out by someone very weird and ostensibly rich, and they just played bad movies to jeer at and mock, and every... Friday was Rocky Horror Picture Show night. I think the small town I was in revolted and raised money to then buy that guy out, but man what a time. Surprised they didn't screen this steamer lol, is all I'm saying.
How do you figure Swift is not a general purpose language ?
Rust. TypeScript. Swift.
28.0M JS+TS
...
5.6M Swift
5.1M Rust
5.0M Go
There aren't a lot of reports presenting absolute numbers and not biased toward a handful of platforms or ecosystems. If you know of other good free ones, feel free to share.
https://research.slashdata.co/reports/6814fddffed4a97023eab0...
EDIT: also I gotta say these numbers seem kinda high. It's hard for me to imagine there's ~28m JS programmers worldwide; that's 1/286 people in the entire world, and the ratio gets less believable as you shrink down the number of people who might have any access at all to a computer/internet/etc. Unless this definition is super broad, I'm quite skeptical.
But golang/newsqueak was developed much earlier, in the early 80s by Rob Pike.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsqueak
```
type point: struct of{ x, y: int; }
a:=mk(array[10] of int) // mk renamed to make
select{ case i = <-c1: a = 1; case c2<- = i: a = 2; }
```
In the late 2000s, this language updated somewhat (for example, the mk function was renamed to make).
Go is like C but with concurrency/strings/GC/a good stdlib
Go is like C++ but simpler/fast compilation/no generics/a good stdlib
Go is like Python but statically typed/multithreaded/fast/single executable
Go is like Java but native/no OO
---
One thing Go haters rarely reckon with is that Go is the only popular modern language (ie from this millennium). Everything else is way older. Well, I would actually say that this is probably the cause of Go hate--if it weren't popular no one would care.