Interesting that a lot of serious and important tools of today are being written in Go (like Docker and Rocket which made another news today). Very impressive for a young programming language which is still at version 1.3.
Except that Docker and probably Rocket work really well. And the speed of development on the projects looks to have benefitted from using Go.
Speed of development is the killer feature that Go has. For me and most people I know who enjoy the language it provides an almost frictionless development experience that makes us more productive than any other language I know.
I'm a language geek so I totally get the whole "Why doesn't go have {Generics,Typeclasses,Hindley-Milner Type Inference,...}" arguments. Sometimes I miss them too. But then I remember how I literally cut months off a personal project's development time using Go. That's when I remember to be greatful for the core teams approach to making a purely pragmatic language that is geared toward frictionless development above all else.
> Except that Docker and probably Rocket work really well. And the speed of development on the projects looks to have benefitted from using Go.
By this you mean that people adopted Go because it is good (in a technical sense), and because of the speed of development rather than because it was "new and shiny"? Fair point.
> I'm a language geek so I totally get the whole "Why doesn't go have {Generics,Typeclasses,Hindley-Milner Type Inference,...}" arguments.
Another counter argument is that golang clearly not an elitist attempt to distance oneself from the mediocre programmer. It is an attempt to distance itself from languages that have a huge surface area. In other words your links premise doesn't fit.
That was but one of the mentions in the article. Take it away and it still is true; many of us programmers seem to be attracted to new and shiny things. No, they don't have to be super-complicated, ground-breaking languages that make you feel like a guitarist who has lost his left arm and now needs to learn how to play using only his right arm. New things are still shiny, even if there are already things that are kind of like them already; those other things have just lost their twinkle with age. If anything, there seems to be many programmers who complain about how new trends are just reinventing 10-20 year old wheels or whatever, that trends are cyclic, and so on.
