[616c]

So beyond the ironic comment mentioned before with the Golang Hello world tutorial using Chinese, what is the real reason behind the Chinese following behind Go?

It seems like this site confirm there must be a pretty dedicated Golang following, but I cannot figure out for the life of me why. Does anyone actually know?

[samnardoni]

For me, Go has the least "What the hell does this code do?" and "Why isn't this code working?" of any language I've ever used.

I'd say Go isn't an impressive programming language, but a very impressive software engineering language.

[bsg75]

> Go isn't an impressive programming language, but a very impressive software engineering language.

Curious, what is the distinction?

[coldtea]

He means that Go will not impress programming language geeks and academic PL researchers with cool evolved syntax or cutting edge features, but is a fine language for actually building software.

In the same sense that a language that "in theory" has tons of cool stuff might be unusuable in practice (due to complexity, opaqueness, lack of libs, strange syntax etc).

[icedchai]

IMO, simplicity, no surprises, doing stuff in a way that "makes sense" without a lot of boilerplate or cruft.

[fredsanford]

Maybe because a lot of choice has been removed from the system? I've worked with a bunch of people from different countries and find that the more strict the gov't, the less they like choice, in general. All anecdotal of course...

Giving one guy from the Ukraine the typical choices at a restaurant here in the US would freeze him in place.

    What would you like to drink?  Tea

    Sweetened or Unsweetened?  Sweet. frustration += 1

    Sugar or artificial sweetener.  Sugar.  frustration += 2

    Soup or Salad?  Soup.  frustration += 7

    Which soup?  Minestrone, Pasta Fagioli, Italian Wedding?  frustration += 14

and on and on... Ukraine started packing his lunch.

Then there was the guy from Iceland... He took 10+ minutes to decide what to order in a new place and once he figured out what he liked in a particular place, he never gave the waitstaff a chance to offer him a choice. This, well done, salad with x dressing, with unsweetened tea. Iceland liked making the choices but only a few times.

Some people like to be dictated to: Code will be formatted like this. Braces will be like this. etc. The author of the article thinks these are a feature while I find it obnoxious.

My brain requires braces to line up in the left column, anything else slows me down. Maybe I'm just old?

[mr_luc]

Off-topic on the subject of restaurants:

I use the ML approach of combining other people's algorithms. :)

My first time in a new place, I'm usually with friends, and I imitate their orders. On the rare times when I'm not, I ask the waiter what the favorite plates of he/the other people in the restaurant are, what they order when they eat there.

This way even my initial orders are lightning-fast and already judged as 'tasty' in comparison to other offerings. And over time, I can investigate other plates for myself.

[asabjorn]

It does not make sense to group peoples reaction to choice like this. As a counter example Apple products are very popular in the USA and other Western Countries, and Apple does not give you many choices.

[fredsanford]

I used a lot of weasel words in my comment to avoid follow up comments like this.

Maybe, anecdotal etc...

It was simply something I noticed from lots of years working with lots of people from lots of different countries. No offense was intended.

[redbad]

    > My brain requires braces to line up in the left column, 
    > anything else slows me down. Maybe I'm just old?

One amazing property of humans is our ability to re-shape ourselves in new environments; to literally learn new tricks. The handicap you identify here is only serving to diminish your potential.

[fredsanford]

I'm not sure it's a handicap...

I've been paid for work in roughly 12 different programming languages over a 28+ year career, among them python (no braces at all, significant white-space), Rexx (keywords as braces), C, C++, Perl, Pascal, Bourne shell, Awk, C#, (braces braces and more braces), x86 assembler and several employer specific scripting tools.

Guess which ones are most comfortable? Certainly not python though it is the most bang for the buck of the languages I use and I'd rather eat hospital food for the rest of my life than write (or, deity forbid read) one more line of x86 assembler.

What was it we were talking about again?

[siddhant]

Not necessarily. I suppose the hello world tutorial shows hello world in Chinese mostly to show Unicode. And as for this link, this is just an external link (http://blog.safariflow.com/2013/02/22/go-as-an-alternative-t...) that someone posted on a forum. Things like these happen on every forum in every country.

[616c]

Yeah, not sure what happened but this was the link below a few minutes ago.

http://bbs.studygolang.com/thread-278-1-1.html

Notice that, despite English content, the forum looks Chinese-language oriented. I think it is cool, but not normal to me.

[Jhsto]

If you meant the Hello World example, it is probably because the board game Go originates from China: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game)

[prewett]

I doubt it. If I recall the example correctly, it was "Hello, 世界!" Since "世界" means "world" the example is really the same "Hello, world!" example from C, only with one of the words changed to something that clearly requires Unicode. That was certainly my reaction when I saw the example: "oh, good, easy Unicode support"

I expect the choice of Chinese as the language is probably the fact that you can't play code page games very easily with Chinese, which you could with Korean, Arabic, etc. It is probably the most widely spoken language with a non-Latin character set. Also, chances are very good that a Chinese-writing colleague of the example writer was readily available. Although, who knows, it would be fun if it were because of the board game.

[justincormack]

There was some discussion here but no OK me seems to know more https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6161399

[freyr]

Your original comment:

> They seem to be making a concerted effort to make Go Chinese friendly https://code.google.com/p/go-zh/

The Chinese fork seems to be a project started by Minux. Minux (Shenghou Ma) is a Go contributer and is very active in the Go community, but he does not work for Google, as far as I know.

[616c]

Interesting. Unfortunately I did not make it past year one Chinese in university, so I do not remember enough. If I had known, I would go find out if he contributes a lot on the Study Golang BBS.

[corresation]

Do you mean specifically why there is a dedicated Chinese following in particular, or just in general?

Go is a clean, intuitive language with a very robust supporting ecosystem and a strong concurrency model. It builds fast, small code and makes quick work of big problems. Why shouldn't there be a big following of one of the better platforms to come out in a long time?

[agentultra]

My only gripe is its intended use as a systems programming language.

The runtime kind of makes it a silo; ie: hard to bind other languages to it through an FFI.

Of course if I am mistaken or there's something being done to address such a scenario then I will be much happier seeing more and more infrastructure code shipping in Go.

[masklinn]

> My only gripe is its intended use as a systems programming language.

It's not. It's a new Java, not a new C++.

> ie: hard to bind other languages to it through an FFI.

More or less impossible: GC and goroutines are not optional so you'd need to cleanly setup and shutdown the Go runtime. You'd have to embed Go as you do Lua or Python.

[slashclee]

> > My only gripe is its intended use as a systems programming language.

> It's not. It's a new Java, not a new C++.

Not according to the Go developers. "Go is a general-purpose language designed with systems programming in mind." http://golang.org/ref/spec#Introduction

[masklinn]

It's not the first time they could be quoted with completely off-their-rocker statements.

[mratzloff]

Go has the same FFI language that most languages do: C.

http://golang.org/cmd/cgo/

[masklinn]

Wrong way around. By "bind languages to it" agentultra talks about using Go from other languages, not using C from Go.

[corresation]

>hard to bind other languages to it through an FFI.

Go has absurdly simple FFI through, as mratzloff mentioned, C. This is self-promotion and apologies, but see my submission history for two examples.