
Tiobe Index: Go language at all time high and in the top 10 - shime
http://tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
======
nickcw
Go may not be the language with the most features or have the longest academic
pedigree but it is really good for getting stuff done.

I think that the problems that Google were trying to solve with go are
particularly relevant to the open source community. In particular simplicity
encourages more contributors.

The way I see it is that the big open source go projects (eg docker,
kubernetes, terraform, etc) have made go popular and a good choice for code
within companies who now want to hire go engineers.

There are lots of little reasons for go's success in the open source world
like gofmt, integrated testing, quick compile times, easy to read, godoc,
single binary deploy, excellent support on all major platforms etc. In short
it is really well engineered.

Go projects seem to be really well engineered in general and make for reliable
Lego bricks for building bigger things out of. (Go dep and vendoring have
helped here.)

Personally speaking go brought back the joy of programming for me getting
useful stuff done (like rclone) quickly with minimal fuss and maximum
reliability.

Long may Go continue in the top 10!

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kerkeslager
It's a real shame that the programming industry has bought into the Go hype so
readily. Don't get me wrong: the design decisions made by the Go team make
lots of sense within the context of Google. But the vast majority of
programmers don't have Google's problems of scale, and by using Go they give
up many benefits of modern type-safe programming languages. There's a method
to Google's madness, but for most development teams, adopting Go is imitating
the madness without understanding the method.

Of course, this is extremely beneficial to Google: they get a community of
people developing free libraries for them. But for the rest of us, it's an
enormous drain of mindshare that could be devoted to more general-purpose
languages.

~~~
curioustom
Honest request - could you list the top benefits of modern languages people
are giving up in favor of Go ?

~~~
kerkeslager
Type checking, mainly. Lack of generics makes the type system fairly useless.
Go generate works around the code duplication caused by no generics, but
exacerbates the debugging problems.

This is a tradeoff, increasing bugs and debugging time in exchange for faster
compilation. I believe the developers when they say this makes sense in a 1
billion line codebase like Google's, but I've worked on 1 million line
codebases and at that size debug time vastly outweighs compilation time in
i.e. C#. I'm actually in a good passion to evaluate this because I worked in
both C# and Java with and without Generics. Most codebases are far fewer than
1 million lines.

There were other big problems with Go last time I checked, but I haven't
looked at it much in a while, so I won't venture to say more since those
things might have changed.

~~~
flashmob
Type system is pretty cool in go. Particularly how the interfaces work, you
don't have to explicitly declare that your object /type implements an
interface, it automatically figures it out.

Lack of genetics makes the code easier to read. Much better with interfaces.
Check this out [http://blog.jonathanoliver.com/golang-has-
generics/](http://blog.jonathanoliver.com/golang-has-generics/)

~~~
kerkeslager
Duck typing is admittedly nice.

The article you linked is deeply confused. He complains about a complicated
generic type that he never encountered, and it's not clear if he's even used
generics at all. He also says that if he needs to reuse something later he'll
just implement an interface (huh?).

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notacoward
I realize that the authors chose to highlight Go's position, but there are so
many more interesting observations that could me made from this list.

* Delphi / Object Pascal is still a thing.

* Ruby has fallen below Go and even Perl. FFS, it's barely holding on vs. assembly language.

* Scratch at #19 makes me happy.

* Rust is still far behind Fortran, Ada, and most interestingly D with which it more directly competes.

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shaftoe
Delphi is #9? Delphi? Where in the world of software development is Delphi not
dead?

~~~
0xFFC
I think there is something seriously wrong with their ranking, Delphi was 12
in 2016 and it increased its ranking to 9 in 2017?

They kidding us. There is no better answer I think. Is there?

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watt
What is going on there? Java drops 6%, C drops 5%, it's like the whole thing
is massively contracting.

For JVM Scala, Kotlin and Groovy add up to 1.2% share, while Clojure is not in
top 50.

~~~
fredley
> The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses
> and third party vendors. Popular search engines such as Google, Bing,
> Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the
> ratings.

I'm not sure what that means, but I'm skeptical. Java for example shows a
steady decline over the whole span of the graph. Then in 2015 it has a massive
surge, then in 2016 a massive decline. C shows a similarly enormous decline ,
of over 50% in 2016. Did the amount of C programmers really drop by half in
2016?

~~~
Macha
Also, JavaScript is at only 2x it's 2004 figure on the graph.

~~~
nulldev
That really does stand out. There simply has to be something wrong with their
JS numbers.

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fulafel
Why do people keep munging the name to "Golang"?

~~~
w8rbt
[https://golang.org/](https://golang.org/)

~~~
dmit
[https://dlang.org](https://dlang.org)

[https://elixir-lang.org](https://elixir-lang.org)

[http://www.groovy-lang.org](http://www.groovy-lang.org)

[http://kotlinlang.org](http://kotlinlang.org)

[https://nim-lang.org](https://nim-lang.org)

[http://racket-lang.org](http://racket-lang.org)

[https://www.ruby-lang.org](https://www.ruby-lang.org)

[https://www.rust-lang.org](https://www.rust-lang.org)

[http://www.scala-lang.org](http://www.scala-lang.org)

=)

~~~
evincarofautumn
There are a bunch—I’ve even got one for a language with almost no users.
Wouldn’t mind a .lang TLD for all things language-related.

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kerkeslager
Could we change the title to reflect that the link contains a ranked list of
programming languages and isn't about Go?

~~~
bostand
Did you even read the article??

Their subtitle is "July headline: Golang at all time high and in top 10"

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bostand
I am really surprised kotlin isn't doing better. What is going on?

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dgudkov
The rise of Scratch is pretty surprising.

