[candiddevmike]

> whose adoption was helped by having critical infrastructure software written in it

Doesn't this contradict the first part of your post? Kubernetes for instance was ported from Java to Go (albeit, poorly). Is Java worse than Go?

[pjmlp]

Java is too advanced for Go folks, it is a PhD level language, when compared with Go minimalism, and their disdain for modern type systems (modern as in, invented in 1976, e.g. CLU and ML).

Also it is quite ironic how given the Java bashing on Go community, there was so little learned from Java evolution and design mistakes.

They even ended up having to reach for the same folks that helped designing Java generics.

As for your remark, the actual rewrite history as told at FOSDEM, is that the rewrite only happened as two strong minded Go devs joined the Kubernetes team and heavily pushed for the rewrite.

[9rx]

> and their disdain for modern type systems

To be fair, it was made abundantly clear when it was first released unto the world that it was intended to feel like a dynamically-typed language, but with performance characteristics closer to statically-typed languages. What little type system it has is there merely to support the performance goals. If they had figured out how to deliver on the performance end as a strictly dynamically-typed language, it is likely it would have gone without a static type system entirely.

Call it distain if you will, but it is not like there weren't already a million other languages with modern, advanced type systems. That market was already, and continues to be, flooded with many lovely languages to choose from. Go becoming yet another just like all the rest would have been rather pointless. "Like Python, but faster" was the untapped market at the time – and serving that market is why it is now a household name instead of being added to the long list of obscure languages that, while technically interesting, all do the same thing.

[jamesrr39]

Hmm, many people writing Java without a PhD...