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Apart from swift on iOS/mobile which is gigantic, you are underestimating the push for Swift by enterprise players (IBM,SAP..). The next big frontier for enterprise applications is cloud, IoT and of course mobile (buzzwords or not). Java is increasingly being used by Oracle to extract revenue, there is no guarantee they will not change their mind and start charging fees from future versions as their other businesses (database, apps etc.) shrink.

The major enterprise players are not going to let Java (with Oracle stewardship) continue to be the language for the next generation of enterprise platforms and be at Oracle's mercy. Swift is open source and apple enterprise agnostic, easy to see other enterprise players pile on this language. IBM and SAP already on board. If you remember, this is how Java came to dominate enterprise space. Don't be surprised if Google release some sort of compatibility layer for Android.

[Case for bringing Swift on the Server by IBM]

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/swift-server

You are also overestimating Go's influence. It has been five years since the language release, it seems to have settled as a niche language like Clojure and topped out. Unless some major platform adopts it, it will remain a niche area. It certainly hasn't replaced (or even come close to) Python, C++, Java in any sense.




Where do you get your stats about Go usage? My data points tell me that it whizzed past Clojure and is still on exponential growth path.

I'm tracking a list of companies that use go: https://quicknotes.io/n/1XB0-Companies%20using%20Go. I stopped adding to it because at this point it's everyone and his mother.

If you go to https://triplebyte.com/ycombinator-startups#q=&page=0&refine..., which is a list of YC companies where you can filter by technology they claim to use, Go is currently ~4.3% (30 startups out of 697).

If you narrow that to just San Francisco, it's 19 out 258 i.e. ~7.4%. I consider SF a leading indicator i.e. other parts of the country and the world will follow that usage growth.

I grant you that it's still far behind Python/Ruby/JavaScript/Java, but those things have exponential growth for a long time and 6 years is early. Those other languages took 10+ years to establish mainstream presence.

Judging by many metrics (number of significant software like Docker or Juju or CockroachDB, number of jobs available, number of Go-related conferences and meetups and their size), Go is easily past "niche language" like Earlang/Haskell and even Clojure and Scala (both of which riding JVM wave) and well on its way to be a peer of Python/Ruby/Java in the next 5-10 years.


You are looking at a narrow slice of technology companies in SF. This is not representative of a general trend. I will add that you are right, it is not "as niche" as clojure. If you look at a broad indices --

1. At Tiobe, it is now at #42. It was language of the year in 2009 and has been slowly moving down

http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index

2. At redmonk programming language rankings, it has been hovering around #15 for more than a year

http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2016/02/19/language-rankings-1-16...

http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2015/01/14/language-rankings-1-15...

http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2015/07/01/language-rankings-6-15...

3. Look at jobs on dice.com same number of jobs for golang and clojure. I have been tracking them occasionally and they seem to around the same since last year.

dice.com

Your use of Docker as a datapoint is interesting, while it is written in golang, far more people use it as a sysadmin tool. So why is that a factor for golang usage? That is a general issue though, lot of infrastructure might be written in golang (and should be) but that doesn't mean there will be golang jobs.

As for taking 10+ years to establish mainstream, things move faster nowadays so unless there is a established or rapidly growing platform exclusively for golang, I wouldn't necessary bank on it becoming hot in another 5-10 years just because it has been around.


Sorry if I was unclear. I intended to communicate that Go has been used in lieu of the three languages at Google. Unsurprisingly, since that was the intent behind developing it.

To the degree IBM and SAP drive enterprise languages I suppose their consultants and sales staff could go whole hog behind Swift as a long term strategy. I'm not sure I see the same strong parallels with Java, I remember Sun playing a role that uniquely leveraged its hardware and software synergy. Redhat played a role there too: there having being at least as much Java as an alternative the Microsoft stack as a dictate of blue suit consultants.

Which makes me wonder if the rationale for Swift's adoption based on open source is significantly more compelling than predicting the adoption of C# on a similar basis or a case that the adoption of the opensource .NET as the replacement for the JVM. I suppose it's that I'm not sure I see IBM and SAP as having orders of magnitude more influence on enterprise or tools selection than Microsoft or that I see top down implementation of consultant recommendations as dominating bottom up decisions by small teams.

Of course, predictions are hard particularly about the future and your mileage may vary.


There is no doubt IBM is making big Swift announcements but IBM is also making huge contribution to Go. They are porting it to PowerPC / s390 architectures. They are also contributing Go based blockchain implementation (~50k LOC) to hyperledger project.

IBM/SAP swift support looks like riding along with marketing of Apple/OSX/ios. These tech consulting giants will definitely make a top-down push for swift but grabbing developer mindshare might not be so easy. At least IBM swift on server support looks Websphere like play. At one point it was a big business or may be still is but given alternative huge number of developers will prefer alternative.

Unlike Java/Swift which are often introduced or talked by executives at Oracle/Apple, Go is not a corporate mandated language and Google execs do not talk about it like android. Google I/O does not have any Go specific talks. The biggest Go conf is organized by 3rd party.

Go influence need not be over or under emphasized. Hugely influential cloud based projects such as Docker/rkt/etcd/kubernetes/juju and many more are written in Go.




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