I'm really uncertain about node being judged more "mature".

Being developed by Thompson and Pike makes you gain something like 30 years of "maturity". Plus, running in production in the Google infrastructure is far more of a proof of maturity than running the chat service of every hackathon project for 2 years.

So do I just email all my questions directly to Thompson and Pike, then?

In this case, language maturity means the quantity of reference material available to help troubleshoot problems as the arise.

The golang nuts mailing list is extremely active, you'd have no issues finding answers there.

Yeah I don't doubt you'd be able to find answers to any Go question, the point though is that you'll have to work a little harder than with a "more mature" "language" like Node.js.

The difference is sending emails to some mailing list and waiting for someone to answer, vs. entering a few keywords to Google and have the top result be the answer you want because someone already asked the same question before.

This is not a stab at Go or its maturity, but rather a realistic assessment of the importance of answers being (nearly) instantly available when you're working on a project or troubleshooting a critical issue.

Agree on that, yet, if you want the big picture, you should multiply that by the probability of having something to troubleshoot, or a critical issue, in the first place.

That would give you a better estimate of the risk you're taking by using that language. And that's where the 30 years of PL design from GO's author gets some importance.

You could consider my argument a bit far fetched, but GO's design has been explicitly focused on keeping things simple and no-surprise, and so far all the reviews seem to agree on that point. That could compensate for the lack of results in Google (especially compared to what node.js forces you to do)

Mature means many things, including being able to get support, packages, existing code, solutions to common problems, etc. I'm sure Go is a solid project.

Two smart guys writing a programming language instantly gets you 30 years of maturity. Did I just wake up in some bizarro universe or something ?

And nobody cares if Go is being used for some tiny, insignificant part of the Google infrastructure. Get back to me when it is used for a stock exchange, betting site or complex web app.

What stock exchange is powered by node.js?

dl.google.com handles all the downloads for google chrome, factory images for android, eclipse.. not exactly tiny and especially not insignificant

complex web app: Cloudfare https://www.cloudflare.com/railgun BBC http://www.quora.com/Go-programming-language/Is-Google-Go-re... Soundcloud http://backstage.soundcloud.com/2012/07/go-at-soundcloud/

If this is your requirement, may I suggest:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/java

Much more so than internet posts about it, there are countless modules for NodeJS as well. Need to upload and store and return images in Monogo using streaming? Done. Need to keep servers running despite errors? Done. Amazon S3? Done. Need an alternate cloud provider? Done. Need login using OAUTH/OpenID/whatever? Done. On and on. Most times you need some general purpose web functionality, there's already a couple Node modules in that area, if not an entire framework or sample app and tutorial targeted at that area.

By now, I'd assume the language run times are in the noise for thinking about maturity. The most likely culprits will be the application code followed by the library code. So the real question should be "Are there any big scary monsters in the libraries I need?". Followed by "Which language do I think will best enable me to hit my target?".