Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by wgyn 2251 days ago
My hot takes...

1) Fast adoption of GoLand/IntelliJ (and death of Sublime/Atom)

2) Nearly complete adoption of modules (my company is behind!)

3) "I feel welcome in the Go community" dipped from 82% to 75%. Anecdotally most people in Go are really nice but some people are aggressively pedantic (don't call it the Golang community!)

3 comments

I've been a Go programmer for many years, and I like the language and the community, but I have not found it to be uniformly welcoming. "Aggressively pedantic" is a good way to put it.
I have been to 4 Go conferences (two gophercons). Despite being first generation mediterranean-descent (my father is the exact immigrant story touted in many circles), because I fit the 'white christian male' bill, I have felt anything but welcome in the Go community. Actually, many times, I feel like it is actively hostile towards me. I remember one of the closing keynotes, a man stood up on the stage and said "Come take a picture with me out back if you look like me, you know who you are" which left me with my jaw dropped.
Not looking to put a bunch of negative energy out about it, but I know what you mean and you're right.
I am missing something. Do you mean you feel there is a hostility toward those who fit the "white christian male" bill?
I think he means the opposite, which is that he fits the "white christian male" and feels that there is hostility towards towards people who fit the "white christian male" bill.
To the contrary, I am usually assumed to be middle eastern (egyptian, oddly enough, although it may not be that surprising considering the hellenistic period and where my relatives are from) and despite being Christian, I am not one of the accepted mainstream forms of Christianity in the US, so I face double prejudice, on the one side from those who think Christianity is the cause of all the worlds problems, on the other side from other Evangelical types who think we are idol worshipping heretics. It is only when I correct people, that I get the "oh" reply, usually in disappointment that now I don't qualify for one of their acceptable groups of people who experienced prejudice or a lack of acceptance.
I've been to 2 Go conferences myself, and had an absolutely fantastic time. Great people all-around.

But ... the online experience here is a bit different from the conference experience.

(I meant nothing like what the other replies to this comment said.)
Re: point 3 the "go" tag on Stack Overflow is the worst one I know. Some very nice and helpful people, and some ... people who just love to nitpick Every. Single. Mistake. Loads of questions in the go tag getting downvoted and closed just because of that :-/

Even as someone who mostly answers questions it's frustrating.

That’s my experience with StackOverflow in general.
It really buggers me that Go had no modules for such a long time.

The first commercial project in our company was done with the stupid old gopath system. Builds broke all the time due to version problems.

It was atrocious and made me never consider Go again. However the module system came along shortly after and while being kind of crappy, compared to systems like the one in Rust, it gets the job done.

We have no Go projects without modules now. This was just a bad experience and i have no idea why a module system was not included in the beginning.

Good tooling should be a first class citizen in every good programming language and library management is part of that.

> i have no idea why a module system was not included in the beginning.

Because Google internally has a monorepo. $GOPATH works great when it contains just one repo.