
Beyond the Hype: 4 Years of Go in Production - neoasterisk
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/go-iron-production
======
joekinley
I'm 15 minutes into the video, and must say, not even considering Erlang might
have been a bad move. Because all the points that are made towards go, seem to
be solved much better with Erlang. I can also see some downsides to chosing
Go, that were not even called on.

Mainly, he said, rolling back on code or updating is just putting the binary
on the server and run this. This means a downtime in the service. Which might
be pretty harsh for a real time data logging and messaging service. With
Erlang, and it's hot code reloading feature, this would be a non-issue.

Also when he talked about the system rarely crashing, could have also been
better addressed with Erlang, as it is part of the main philosophy to deal
with this.

I think Erlang would have been an even better choice for this company.

~~~
joekinley
And the first question was about Erlang (just saw it now). The answer
explained it, they were "just not into it" and "nobody really knew about it".

Apparently they didn't even deeply looked into the language, and as the
discussion with one of the first commenters (which could be barely heard
unfortunately) shows, that Erlang might have been another good choice, but it
seemed to be a greater risk for them than going the go route.

It is interesting that a pro point for Go was for him because it was backed by
Google. This apparently was one pro to go with the risk of the language,
which, regarding Erlang, being backed by Ericsson, was NOT a pro.

For this company it worked out good going the Go route, and there is nothing
wrong with that, it just seems that going the other risk with Erlang, and
actually having put in the work to properly research it, might have been an
even better step into the software, and the downsides that are apparent
through the presentation and the half sentences you could understand from the
discussion with the first commenter.

------
joekinley
I don't like, and actually don't understand his point on "Why not JavaScript".

His answer was "It's JavaScript", and "Performance is good, but it's still
JavaScript". Does not explain at all why.

Could have made the same point with Java, but there he actually gave
explanations for it.

So why the JavaScript hate? I don't want to start a language war here, but a
professional explanation that explains the decission, apart from that bully
answer, would be interesting.

