[robonerd]

> However, the fanbase usually acts as a cult pretending that issues are features.

Per Rob Pike (Lang NEXT 2014), golang was created for fairly young programmers that are fresh out of school and don't know many other languages.

So, something I've observed: When somebody doesn't know many things but is building a career, planning their life, on one of the things they know, they're going to take that one thing more personally. This is why it's good for people to be exposed to a diversity of ideas early on. Early exposure to diverse ideas helps engineers reason about tools and systems more objectively, with less input from their ego.

[vrnvu]

Do you have any data or survey to back your statement? Forgive me if I've misunderstood you but are you saying that Golang is mostly used by young programmers?

In my experience most Golang developers are highly experienced... Same with Rust.

[pjmlp]

Yes, you just needed to search for Lang NEXT 2014 and Rob Pike.

Enjoy the video, https://youtu.be/YM7QYx-LPSA

"The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt."

Or if you prefer reading, https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article

"It must be familiar, roughly C-like. Programmers working at Google are early in their careers and are most familiar with procedural languages, particularly from the C family. The need to get programmers productive quickly in a new language means that the language cannot be too radical."

[robonerd]

> https://youtu.be/YM7QYx-LPSA

That link is to a panel Rob Pike participated in at the same conference. I'm not sure if he makes similar remarks during that panel, but that "fairly young, fresh out of school" quote specifically comes from Rob Pike's presentation at the same conference titled From Parallel to Concurrent, which you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTrP_EmGNmw

[pjmlp]

You're right, thanks for the correction.

[robonerd]

There are two parts of my comment. The first part paraphrases what Rob Pike said about the purpose of Golang, in his presentation at Lang NEXT 2014:

> "The key point here is that our programmers are Googlers, they're not researchers. They're typically fairly young, fresh out of school. Probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They're not capable of understanding a brilliant language. But we want to be able to use them to build good software. And so the language we give them needs to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt."

The second part is based on my personal observations of human nature. Young and relatively inexperienced engineers often form a sort of personal attachment to whatever technology is enabling their new career. With this personal attachment comes a perception of attack against their person when that technology is criticized. This is a broad phenomena, not unique to golang by any means, but golang happens to be one of the languages that is popular with and promoted to young engineers. In discussions critical about golang, or javascript, or C, or python, there will often be young or otherwise inexperienced engineers interpreting criticism of the tool to be personal attacks.