[stouset]

I can sympathize somewhat with this argument. But it’s also kind of circular to me.

Go being easy to pick up and learn is certainly a virtuous cycle insofar as it helps bootstrap a large community. And that’s absolutely happened!

But that is—in my mind—more of an explanation for why Go has become so popular so quickly more than it is a compelling argument for the language itself. Haskell having conversion friction might explain its lack of adoption, and that’s certainly a great argument in a discussion about why or why not to adopt it for yourself or your team! But it seems like an overvalued axis on which people seem to evaluate languages on their own.

As a counterexample: PHP classically had a reputation as being a language that was very easy for beginners to pick up. And it’s even memory safe! But it also had a reputation for having poor long-term prospects for projects written it as well as being a limiting factor in the growth of engineers using it (note: I make no claims as to the fairness of this reputation, nor to its applicability on “modern” PHP).

PHP is arguably even easier to learn than Go. So why is it that virtually nobody jumps in these discussions trumpeting that?