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by tristan_juricek 4872 days ago
Yes, but at what point does go transition from obscurity to PG's "python paradox"?

http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html

It sure seems Scala's in this "python paradox" land now. My guess is that you need some startups make it big using Go to evangelize it. Google using it is interesting, but I'm not sure it makes it "cool".

Though, I'm not sure Java was ever a language you could use as a skillset filter. Hm.
2 comments
mhd 4871 days ago
I think a lot of the "coolness" factor of Go comes not from its parent company, but from some of its core developers, namely Rob Pike & Ken Thompson. That gives Go a serious Bell Labs/Unix/Plan 9 pedigree.

I don't follow the mailing list anymore, so I don't know if it already led to the same "cargo cult" fanboyship that Plan 9 sometimes evokes, where a lot of the idiosyncratic opinions of its developers (e.g. "shared libraries are bad") are basically never questioned and repeated almost like holy scripture.

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tristan_juricek 4869 days ago
I tend to think of "coolness" as a kind of reason behind early adoption, more like "this thing as a large opportunity for catching on".

I'm not 100% sure would make the argument that "Rob Pike and Ken Thompson made it". Instead, I'd say "it's in use at Google, and all of these other startups..." If 1 or 2 of those startups hit it big (e.g. Twitter or LinkedIn kind of big) that might have a bit more of an "Ooo" factor.

Though I have said, "it's incredibly well thought out, look, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson know what they're doing". I don't sense this quite had the gravitas I was looking for yet. Hm.

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pjmlp 4871 days ago
Yes!
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SeanDav 4872 days ago
Pretty much anything Google does is cool. Probably same could be said about Amazon, Facebook et al.

Depends a lot on your interpretation of "Cool" though.

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tristan_juricek 4872 days ago
Right.

I get more of the sense that Google is more "impressive" than "cool".

If I were to use "Google's got it in production" I might be told something like "well they can pull this off" as if they have some unattainable smarts or something.

Whereas a "cool" thing is more about just simply taking a risk.

Come to think of it, that's kind of a funny definition. Oh well.

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