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by fouc 2245 days ago
Has anyone noticed "Modern and Cross Platform" usually means Golang?
1 comments

This industry is insanely fad driven. Every aspect of it. Terminology, tech stacks and methodologies are all one fad after another.
Lots of products, including ours, running on Go. It's not a fad, it's a useful tool. Not the best programming language in the world, but still allows you to produce great results in a short time. Kind of like Delphi what used to be for the Windows desktop.
I’m not sure Go is what I’d call a fad.

Is Java a fad? Its early years were much more hype driven than Go has been at any time during the 10 years Go has been around.

Python? JavaScript? Ruby? Rust?

What I like about the Go community is that it appears to be very measured. Unlike many other communities where the way a language is used becomes bigger than the language. Like Spring and Java. Rails and Ruby.

Or Rust and “look I reimplement X despite nobody giving two shits”. :-)

(My big disappointment with Rust is that it hasn’t found its niche. I’d like that niche to be embedded operating systems. We could certainly use Rust there, because C, C++ and the utterly shit Python-junk used to stich things together is just painful . Competing for attention in server development or any other area that has very strong contenders is clearly an uphill battle)

Go is over a decade old, not counting a couple of years of development in private. I'm not the biggest fan of the language but it's hard to think of it as a fad.
Fad or not, in terms of programming languages, ten years isn't such a long time. It typically takes a few years just to reach the eco system maturity and community size needed to become a popular language. Rust is also ca. ten years old and I'd argue that it still haven't reached its full potential.
The language absolutely was a fad for a while. The shiny new thing everyone was moving to. That is how languages get popular. But languages unlike terminology don't just disappear.