I think it's more correct to say that Go is a better C (or perhaps: Pascal) than Python (or Ruby).
A lot of the rewrites I've seen done in Go, could probably have been done in C. The thing is, for lots of problems, Go is a better C than C. You can bolt on lots of safety features on top of C, and I think you could probably be very productive and safe in C if you forgot a lot of the dangerous features that C turns "on by default". It is for example possible to use Pascal strings in C.
I don't think the comparison with Vala (or Nimrod) is too far off -- but the Go team has lots of experience with language and system design -- and I think that really helps Go be a productive tool.
The fact that you are getting so many "erhm, I don't think so" probably indicates that it wasn't a good comment that promotes discussion.
"Clearly X is better than Y" don't do anything except incite flame wars. You can remedy the situation by explaining and showing in what areas it is better or explain what your experience of seeing the benefits are. Just leaving at "X is better than Y obviously..." that usually doesn't end well.
That is why I asked you why it was better, even thought you already answered it 3 times, because it was another chance to explain why it was better.
>The fact that you are getting so many "erhm, I don't think so" probably indicates that it wasn't a good comment that promotes discussion.
Well, that's because they haven't been following the discussion, on HN and on startup circles, going on for a while.
For one, Go creators' themselves said they expected Go to attract more C++/Java people, but instead they got more Python/Ruby people. And that's like 2 years ago.
For the past year or so, there have been numerous posts about how this or that project/startup switched from Ruby/Python to Go. Last 2 weeks alone there have been around 5 such posts on the front page of Hacker News (Digital Ocean being the latest).
Go is getting increasingly used by people that were doing infastructure/backend work in Python/Ruby etc, e.g people using stuff like Twisted and Tornado, JSON services, etc.
>That is why I asked you why it was better, even thought you already answered it 3 times, because it was another chance to explain why it was better.
Well, I guess he pre-supposed people are already familiar with all the "we rewrote our system in Go and we now have X times better performance, no more gimmicks to get async, etc".
Really, it's all anecdata. To be clear, when I say "better," (not "clearly better" as you quoted) I mean "I see lots of people re-writing their Ruby/Python code in Go, and they're very happy with the results." Here's the most recent story I remember: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7628472
