[holydude]

Yes but the problem with languages like Nim is lack of support and maturity. Go is more versatile and at the same time more mature than anything out there. It is a different design and it excels in what it does (considering all tradeoffs now).

Will Nim be as versatile and solid as Go in the future? Hard to predict but i would say no. You need a solid financial backing and certain amount of adoption where people actually write software that makes them money.

[scriptkiddy]

> Yes but the problem with languages like Nim is lack of support and maturity.

Agreed, that's why I don't use it for anything super important yet. Nim is approaching a 1.0 release soon. Go has a similar problem in that it is maintained almost entirely by Google who has a history of dropping projects without warning.

> Go is more versatile and at the same time more mature than anything out there.

This is objectively incorrect. In fact, Go aims precisely to be non-versatile for the sake of simplicity. That is why Go does not have generics for instance.

> It is a different design and it excels in what it does (considering all tradeoffs now)

I don't think it's design is all that different. It looks like a stripped down version of C and it's definitely not the first PL focused on concurrency.

> Will Nim be as versatile and solid as Go in the future?

Nim is already leagues above Go in the versatility(I assume you mean flexibility?) department. As far Nim being as "solid" as Go, I'm not entirely sure what you mean. If you're asking about stability, I believe that Nim can reach a similar level of stability as Go, yes.

> You need a solid financial backing and certain amount of adoption where people actually write software that makes them money.

I agree with this. However, it's not always a quick process. The only reason Go is as popular as it is is because of Google's size and reputation(edited). Every programmer on Earth heard of Go within a few days of it's official release. Nim is taking a slow roll approach. Look at Python. It took almost 15 years before it started getting really popular.

All that said, I didn't come into this thread to argue about Go vs Nim. I've been accused of shilling Nim in the past. I'm sorry that I like talking about PLs I enjoy using.

[zellyn]

It's more than fine to be enthusiastic about programming languages. However, some of your points about Go are dubious.

The reasons Go doesn't (yet) have generics are practical rather than philosophical. And well-documented.

I also don't believe Google's marketing budget contributed much if anything to supporting Go. The _reputation_ of Google and the Go authors was far more important. (Personally, when I saw people like Brad Fitzpatrick try Go and rave about it making programming fun again, I decided to try it.)

You can happily accuse me of shilling Go if you like :-)

[scriptkiddy]

No, I encourage you to shill in fact.

> The reasons Go doesn't (yet) have generics are practical rather than philosophical. And well-documented.

Can you give an example? I guess I fail to understand why a statically typed language would choose to forgo all of the advantages generics provide. Does it have something to do with Goroutines?

> I also don't believe Google's marketing budget contributed much if anything to supporting Go.

I didn't necessarily mean their marketing budget. I should probably edit that. I meant that anything they do is news.

[zellyn]

> Can you give an example? I guess I fail to understand why a statically typed language would choose to forgo all of the advantages generics provide. Does it have something to do with Goroutines?

Like I said, the objections are practical, not philosophical:

They published four past design docs for generics in Go that simply didn't pass technical muster (https://github.com/golang/proposal/blob/master/design/15292-...)

Also, rsc stated he plans to understand generics better in 2017: https://research.swtch.com/go2017#generics

Also, bradfitz said recently on the GoTimeFM podcast that doing Generics and Go2 together makes sense.

> I didn't necessarily mean their marketing budget. I should probably edit that. I meant that anything they do is news.

I feel like the comments from others about Dart give the lie to this one. Go is fantastically, dramatically, massively more popular than Dart, which is also from Google.

[unscaled]

> Like I said, the objections are practical, not philosophical

Russ Cox and Rob Pike keep repeating this mantra, but I don't buy it. No, I don't believe they object the idea of generics itself. And yes, generics pose practical complexities and a plethora of issues that have to be resolved.

But so does every other language feature. The features you choose to add reflect your philosophical values and priorities.

Go chose to bake some hitherto very niche features that could have been as libraries into the language. Channels in particular, are a language construct only because Go doesn't allow operator overloading and generics for user types. But channels get them, because channels are demonstratively important for Rob Pike[1].

There's nothing wrong with that of course, but that's a philosophical decision. Why channels can avoid the vagaries of interface{} boxing, but not sets, linked lists or queues?

The reality is that every modern statically typed language except Go has generics, and they all implemented them very well. The ML languages and Ada were already doing it in the 80s, and OCaml and Eiffel managed to combine generics and polymorphism back in the 90s.

It seems to me that when originally designing Go, Pike, Griesemer and Thompson just didn't think generics are worthwhile enough for the effort it takes to properly research them.

When Go was started, its authors mostly looked to languages which implemented generics later in their lifecycle (namely Java and C++) and their implementations suffered from problems due to other, rather obvious, design defects: https://research.swtch.com/generic

I'm happy to see that this attitude is changing, and other languages are looked at.

[1] https://swtch.com/~rsc/thread/

[zellyn]

> The reality is that every modern statically typed language except Go has generics, and they all implemented them very well. The ML languages and Ada were already doing it in the 80s, and OCaml and Eiffel managed to combine generics and polymorphism back in the 90s.

> It seems to me that when originally designing Go, Pike, Griesemer and Thompson just didn't think generics are worthwhile enough for the effort it takes to properly research them.

Are you arguing that it's easy, and they just haven't done it? Or are you arguing that it wasn't important enough at first, and so the implementation developed in directions that preclude straightforward implementations now? I can believe the latter, but after reading the multiple, detailed proposals from Ian Lance Taylor, I don't believe the former.

[geodel]

> The only reason Go is as popular as it is is because of Google's marketing budget. Every programmer on Earth heard of Go within a few days of it's official release.

I think Google put lot of marketing budget for Dart. But I don't see it ever comes in discussion regarding popularity or lack of it.

It is fine a lot of people do not like Go but claiming its popular just because of Google seems baseless.

[scriptkiddy]

Well, Go is obviously not a bad language. That said, I do think that it's adoption was primarily fueled by Google's popularity. Imagine go being released by a single person or small group of people. How would people have heard about it?

[fmstephe]

I think this isn't quite true. From my perspective, Go did get a massive boost but not from Google. The language was originally designed by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson.

It is fair to say that without those names attached I would have likely passed it by. Google is boring, but those three names, for me at least, I had to take a look.

[SwellJoe]

If Google could make a language popular, where does Dart fit into the story? People seem to love Go, and with very little encouragement from Google. I don't see a lot of love for Dart...though everyone who's played with it seems to like it well enough.

[pjmlp]

Dart was betrayed by Chrome and Angular teams as they decided to drop support for it.

Let's see if Flutter and Fuschia teams manage to push adoption for Dart.

[eternalban]

Someone said this and it feels correct: it is not a bad language, but it is also not a good language.

> Google & adoption

I think it helped get around the initial cycle of drawing in the curious. An argument counter to claims regarding the importance of the people involved would point out Plan9 etc. that are hardly widely known, much less adopted.

In sum, I think the role of Google in one becoming a Go programmer depends entirely on when it happened. Today, of course Go has its own brand name. 8 years ago, it was Google that eased the debutante phase of the language.

[holydude]

No it is absolutely fine to be enthusiastic about PLs. I enjoy reading about production ready Nim or Crystal apps :-)

[scriptkiddy]

Glad to hear it. Crystal is another language I've been getting more and more curious about lately.

[solidsnack9000]

> Go is more versatile and at the same time more mature than anything out there.

This doesn't seem like a very credible statement on the face of it. Is Go more mature and more versatile than Python? Than Java? Than...Scala? Go does seem to share a lot of use cases (and limitations) with Java; and it would be hard to call it more mature.

[ieRei6ae]

> the problem with languages like Nim is lack of support and maturity

It was the same for Linux, Python, Ruby. Being community-driven can be a bug or a feature.

> Go is more versatile

Nim has macros, templates, overloading and compiles to C, JS, Objective-C. Runs on more architectures than Go including arduino microcontrollers.

> mature than anything out there

Go is not more mature than C, C++, Java, Python, Perl...

> You need a solid financial backing

See Linux, Python, Ruby... many projects had no big company or funding behind them.