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Go is still not good

(blog.habets.se)
644 points ustad | 1 comments | 22 Aug 25 09:25 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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SkepticalWhale ◴[22 Aug 25 15:37 UTC] No.44985889[source]▶
Go has its fair share of flaws but I still think it hits a sweet spot that no other server side language provides.

It’s faster than Node or Python, with a better type system than either. It’s got a much easier learning curve than Rust. It has a good stdlib and tooling. Simple syntax with usually only one way to do things. Error handling has its problems but I still prefer it over Node, where a catch clause might receive just about anything as an “error”.

Am I missing a language that does this too or more? I’m not a Go fanatic at all, mostly written Node for backends in my career, but I’ve been exploring Go lately.

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ecshafer ◴[22 Aug 25 15:46 UTC] No.44986010[source]▶
> It’s faster than Node or Python, with a better type system than either. It’s got a much easier learning curve than Rust. It has a good stdlib and tooling. Simple syntax with usually only one way to do things. Error handling has its problems but I still prefer it over Node, where a catch clause might receive just about anything as an “error”.

I feel like I could write this same paragraph about Java or C#.

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acedTrex ◴[22 Aug 25 15:58 UTC] No.44986143[source]▶
Java and C# are both languages with A LOT more features and things to learn. Go someone can pick 80% of the language up in a single day.
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bob1029 ◴[22 Aug 25 17:12 UTC] No.44987049{3}[source]▶
Just because you can learn about something doesn't mean you need to. C# now offers top-level programs that are indistinguishable from python scripts at a quick glance. No namespaces, classes or main methods are required. Just the code you want to execute and one simple file.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/fundamentals...

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acedTrex ◴[22 Aug 25 17:45 UTC] No.44987427{4}[source]▶
I mean thats fine, but thats hardly applicable to the ease of throwing a new dev into a very large c# codebase and how quickly they can ramp up on the language.
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1. novok ◴[22 Aug 25 17:55 UTC] No.44987536{5}[source]▶
Any large codebase has a large ramp up time by virtue of being large. And the large codebase can have devex automation to get past the initial ceremony setup of larger languages like Java. It feels like the wrong thing to optimize for. As a better alternative to small services that would've been made in python or node, yes for sure, then the quick setup and simplicity of go makes sense. Which is why the biggest audience of people who use go and used another language previously is python engineers and people who want to make small network services.

At the larger codebase go company I worked at, the general conclusion was: Go is a worse Java. The company should've just used Java in the end.