Comment by trueno

2 days ago

i see a lot of go hatred on HN but coming from c i actually kind of love go when i need just enough abstracted away from me to focus on doing a thing efficiently and still end up with a well-enough performing binary. i have always been obsessed with the possibility of building something that doesn't need me to install runtimes on the target i want to run it, it's just something that makes me happy. very rarely do i need to go lower than what go provides and when i do i just.. dip into c where i earned a lot of my stripes over the years.

rust is cool. a lot of really cool software im finding these days is written in rust these days & i know im missing some kind of proverbial boat here. but rusts syntax breaks my brain and makes it eject completely. it's just enough to feel like it requires paradigm shifts for me, and while others are really good at hopping between many languages it's just a massive weakness of mine. i just cant quite figure out the ergonomics of rust so that it feels comfy, my brain seems to process everything through a c-lens and this is just a flaw of mine that makes me weak in software.

golang was started by some really notable brains who had lots of time in the game and a lot of well thought out philosophies of what could be done differently and why they should do it differently coming from c. there was almost a socio-economic reason for the creation of go - provide a lang that people could easily get going in and become marketable contributors that would help their career prospects. and i think it meets that mark, i was able to get my jr engineers having fun in golang in no time at all & that's panned out to be a huge capability we added to what our team can offer.

i like the objective of rue here. reviewing the specification it actually looks like something my brain doesn't have any qualms with. but i dont know what takes a language from a proposal by one guy and amplifies it into something thats widely used with a great ecosystem. other minds joining to contribute & flesh out standard libraries, foundations backing, lots of evangelism. lots of time. i won't write any of those possibilities off right now, hopefully if it does something right here there's a bright future for it. sometimes convincing people to try a new stack is like asking them to cede their windows operating system and try out linux or mac. we've watched a lot of languages come and go, we watch a lot of languages still try to punch thru their ceilings of general acceptance. unlike some i dont really have huge tribalistic convictions of winners in software, i like having options. i think it's pretty damn neat that folks are using their experiences with other languages to come up with strong-enough opinions of how a language should look and behave and then.. going out and building it.