[axaxs]

They couldn't be further from each other. Just from browsing code, they are on opposite ends of the spectrum. Go is easily readable, but at the cost of brevity. Perl is -typically- unreadable, with a lot of one liner magic. If you are stating merely can a person write a web app in both, well, I think that goes for any language in existence.

[cr0sh]

Perl could've been readable - nothing in the language prevents you from writing readable code. The problem was two-fold, imho:

1) regex was treated like the primary way to do things - even when it wasn't necessarily called for - at the expense of readability (and Perl supported it so well)

2) sysadmins

The two combined together (and possibly the fact that it was the early days of commercial internet service) led to the idea that anything done in Perl was destined to look like "line noise" to actual SWEs.

/just how I saw it...

[gcbw2]

I know. Perl was all that at the time. daunting! modern! no compiler OMG! text transformation on the code itself! it was the bee knees.

All that Go delivers today, over the medium, is very similar to what perl also delivered yesteryear, on top of yesteryear medium. But also like perl, it is being born from a bunch of old unix system engineers :)

[ptx]

Are you sure you're not confusing Go with some other language?

> daunting!

Go is often praised for being simple.

> modern!

...and criticized for being too simple, ignoring modern advances in programming language research.

> no compiler OMG!

The compiler and its careful tradeoff between fast compilation and fast programs is a key characteristic of Go.

> text transformation on the code itself!

Go doesn't have macros. Instead people fall back on code generation, just like Java.