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by KronisLV 1648 days ago
Hmm, why would anyone even bother pulling out said pitchforks?

In my eyes, Go is a pretty reasonable choice: the language is decent, simple enough to be learnt in a relatively short amount of time, is reasonably readable and doesn't force you to work in a really low level of abstraction.

The runtime is also pretty good and the static executables that can be generated are a major boon in my eyes! None of the pain of Python's packaging challenges and performance that's generally pretty good when compared to many of the alternatives.

Sure, it's not as established like Java or .NET are, especially in the enterprise space, but nonetheless it is very capable for everything from utilities and small tools to web apps.

Edit:

> As Rails has waned in popularity, has any other tech stack taken that crown?

Actually, after re-reading the original post, i'm not sure what the question is, exactly. In my eyes, the languages that are fun are whatever allows me to solve problems and see results (which is where a lot of satisfaction lies for me) relatively quickly: so anything from aforementioned Ruby, PHP (with select frameworks), Java (with select frameworks), .NET (Core or newer), Python, Node and so on are still fun in my eyes.

Was OP perhaps looking for languages that feel more "fresh" and are more hyped, while still having vibrant communities around them?

2 comments

> Was OP perhaps looking for languages that feel more "fresh" and are more hyped, while still having vibrant communities around them?

For me, it's more about the day-to-day experience, hence the reference to React Native. I'm dismayed by its popularity, because it feels like such a step backwards - the ugly language (Typescript is slightly better than JS but still not great), the massive amounts of external dependencies required for even simple projects, the bugs, the lack of a decent debugger, and so on. All those things take away from the day-to-day enjoyment of programming.

> Hmm, why would anyone even bother pulling out said pitchforks?

It repeatedly get raked over the coals here for being dumb, inelegant, stuck in the 80's and an overall Bad Language Which Cannot Be Taken Seriously. :)

I'm sorry that you had to experience that!

The biggest criticisms that i've heard of Go is that the error handling ends up with a lot of boilerplate due to the syntax, and previously people also complained about the lack of generics (which is now being added and refined).

If anything, i would expect people to be more negative towards PHP because, while the language and its ecosystem have both come a long way towards being pleasant to work in and overall capable, i'm sure that plenty out there have ran into horrible WordPress sites/plugins or old and neglected codebases with bespoke frameworks that have no documentation and that are just horrible to work with.

In contrast, to me Go actually feels like what Pascal should have been.

> I'm sorry that you had to experience that!

It's fine, I'm not religiously affiliated with any technology to be offended. I've worked with everything from Haskell to C, from Rust to Go, from Lua to Lisps, from BlueSpec to Prolog - and that's been a good lesson that there's more to a language than its' syntax and semantics as analyzed in a vacuum on an internet forum. And that you should use different tools for different jobs - and usually the simplest tool which works is the best choice.

Go is very often that simple tool which works for most simple things.

> Go is very often that simple tool which works for most simple things.

If only folks applied that kind of thinking to things like architecture and devops.