

Google Trends: Golang is popular in China - gejjaxxita
https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=golang

======
beefsack
It's anecdotal, but I live a fair bit of the time in Guangzhou and noticed a
lot of Chinese developers I've met there have taken great interest in Go. The
surge in popularity seems to have been since an impressively detailed ebook in
Chinese on writing web applications in Go[1] was released a couple of years
back now, and remains a very popular project on GitHub.

It is worth noting though that the most popular languages in China reflect the
major languages around the rest of the world, a GitHub search for a very
common Chinese character[2] shows that for the Chinese open source community.

[1] [https://github.com/astaxie/build-web-application-with-
golang](https://github.com/astaxie/build-web-application-with-golang)

[2]
[https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=%E7%9A%84&ref=cmdform&s=s...](https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=%E7%9A%84&ref=cmdform&s=stars&type=Repositories)

~~~
Gigablah
I went to the inaugural meetup for the Singapore Golang group last night, the
author of that ebook (Asta Xie) was presenting a general introduction to Go :)

For what it's worth, he mentioned that an increasing amount of companies in
China are now using Go in production.

------
mdda
Another anecdote : The Kick-Off GoLang Meetup was held in Singapore last
night. There was a large Chinese contingent in comparison to other meetups
(turnout 20-30, majority Chinese. SingaporeJS turnout 100-150, much more mixed
crowd : Where mixed in SG programming seems to usually imply a large
number/majority of Western ex-pats).

The main speaker was the developer behind Beego
([https://github.com/astaxie](https://github.com/astaxie)), who showed slides
that included usage at Chinese companies, etc). Apparently there are quite a
few Chinese on-line gaming companies testing the limits of the language
(particularly GC-wise).

------
yohui
Google Trends also tracks "Go" (Programming Language) as a topic:
[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F09gbxjr](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F09gbxjr)

For which the order of regional interest is different and somewhat less
lopsided, though China remains an outlier at the top.

I'm not too sure what the results mean, though. For example, if Google Trends
is to be believed, RWBY (an American-made anime-esque web series) is massively
popular in Taiwan:
[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F0vsrh7z](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F0vsrh7z)

and Mongolians are incredibly fascinated with Elon Musk:
[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F03nzf1](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F03nzf1)

But I'm at a loss to explain how that could be the case.

~~~
coriny
"...and Mongolians are incredibly fascinated with Elon Musk".

I would bet that is a false positive (note it's the fuzzier 'topic' not
'search term') from Mongolian musk ox.

------
rakoo
Remember that the sheer number of people makes all country-based comparisons
pointless.

Here, China has 3 times more searches for Golang but has a more than 100 times
bigger population. That would make Go more popular in Sweden... except if you
consider that not everyone searches for "golang", which is much more visible
when you look at the city-based comparison (a more accurate description of
what's happening)

~~~
neurobro
Is that really how Google gauges interest? Raw number of searches? I would
think it's more useful to normalize in some way (perhaps by searches across
all countries) for the very reason you state.

If so, maybe what's happening is that Baidu doesn't provide very good results
for Golang, so a relatively large proportion of Google's small market presence
in China are people who jumped to Google just to search for Golang.

------
jiyinyiyong
There are already three Golang-based forums (built with Go, talk about Go) in
China. While for Node.js , Ruby, Python, we don't see these many.

* [http://golangtc.com](http://golangtc.com)

* [http://studygolang.com](http://studygolang.com)

* [http://bbs.go-china.org](http://bbs.go-china.org)

Also to mention, Swift is a surprisingly hot topic in Chinese Developer
community:

* [http://swift.sh/](http://swift.sh/)

* [http://www.douban.com/group/522213/](http://www.douban.com/group/522213/)

And project on translating Swift was quickly started:

* [https://github.com/numbbbbb/the-swift-programming-language-i...](https://github.com/numbbbbb/the-swift-programming-language-in-chinese)

~~~
ksec
There is Ruby China [https://ruby-china.org/](https://ruby-china.org/)

------
munimkazia
Is this probably because of the native unicode support in the language?

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vorg
Check out Groovy's popularity on bintray maven in China. Visit
[https://bintray.com/groovy/maven/groovy/view/statistics](https://bintray.com/groovy/maven/groovy/view/statistics)
then click _country_.

700,000 downloads in the last month, with 646,000 of them from China and only
21,000 from the US and 3000 from Germany, the 3 largest downloading countries.

Of course the point I'm making is web-based queries aren't enough to ascertain
a programming language's adoption.

------
seanewest
Why are there no programming languages that use native vocabulary from other
spoken languages (e.g. Mandarin)? Couldn't somebody make a coffeescript-like
transpiler that converts if/for/which/import etc and library methods like
printf/webserver/listen to another language? I would think writing code in a
language you might not understand well would be a handicap.

Example:
[https://github.com/chanxuehong/wechat](https://github.com/chanxuehong/wechat)

~~~
nnq
And as your link shows, writing the documentation in any other language than
English is a 100% efficient way to _totally handicap_ an open-source
project...

~~~
seanewest
That would definitely be true if there weren't a lot of native speakers of
your language in the open source community. The link I gave was (I believe) in
Mandarin, and there are a lot of Mandarin speaking individuals in the open
source world.

~~~
gejjaxxita
I'm not a native English speaker but I would never consider writing non-
English technical documentation. The case of a potential OSS contributor
having meaningful contributions but not understanding English sufficiently to
understand the documentation is too rare to worry about.

------
cnbuff410
I'm not sure Go is more popular in China than in US. Based on what I heard,
The companies using Go is definitely more in US, and it's the same case for
online discussion and offline meetups.

I don't quite get why the search traffic for "Golang" is so much bigger in
China, unless there are some companies there use Go in their production in
large scale _secretly_

~~~
1ris
Maybe they just communicate in Chinese. That does not seem unlikely, and
likely is the same as "secret" for you.

~~~
cnbuff410
I'm not sure if "not being able to understand Chinese therefore all their
communication looks like secret" is the reason for me to get downvotes. FWIW,
I'm native Chinese speaker living in US and have been closely following the
Go's usage in both places

------
est
NodeJS too is popular in China

[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=nodejs](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=nodejs)

But not Node.JS

[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=node.js](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=node.js)

------
jackyb
One of the Go developers did say that Go has a big following in China in
GopherCon 2014, thanks to Windows.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=u-k...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=u-kkf76TDHE#t=1743)

------
zhengwy
Given google now only occupies less than 1% of the search engine market in
China[1], it makes even less sense why China's trending is an outlier among
all the countries.
[1][http://engine.data.cnzz.com/](http://engine.data.cnzz.com/)

------
freeyoru
I think actually the reason is programming is popular in China. So based on
the population (that knows how to write code), eventually all programming
languages will appear to be popular in China on Google Trends.

~~~
mb22
you may be correct, however I have a reasonably popular golang library on
github and a significant amount of folks that star it appear to be from China,
a much higher percentage than my projects in other languages.

~~~
seanewest
I'm curious, do they tend to submit pull requests and issues?

------
farslan
I've noticed that too mainly because I see lot's of stargazers for
[https://github.com/fatih/vim-go](https://github.com/fatih/vim-go) to be
Chinese people.

------
closetnerd
but scala is killing it compared to go:

[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=golang%2C%20%2Fm%2F0...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=golang%2C%20%2Fm%2F091hdj&cmpt=q)

~~~
cnbuff410
I don't see how Scala is "killing it" in China[1]. China is even not in top 10
in terms of contribution for Scala's search traffic.

[1]:
[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F09gbxjr%2C%20...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F09gbxjr%2C%20%2Fm%2F091hdj&cmpt=q)

~~~
closetnerd
whoa you're so damn right actually ... the trends weren't specific to china
... i assumed they were since i edited the OP's link

actually it seems Go is seriously killing it in China:

[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Go%2C%20Scala&geo=CN...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Go%2C%20Scala&geo=CN&cmpt=q)

but otherwise Scala has been doing better with Go making a case for itself

~~~
ramblerman
your link compares scala to the phrase "go".

Related searches: "go go", "go to"

------
jaekwon
Yeah, I noticed that too. Is it actually the case?

------
gregimba
Name collision?

------
clubhi
The chinese word for ninja is lang. Hence the phrase "golang". They are just
very big Ninja Turtle/Vanilla Ice Fans.

~~~
jackyb
No, Chinese word for ninja is 忍者 (ren zhe).

~~~
wavefunction
It's a mutant teenager's turtle ninja fantasy.

