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It was no longer relevant and seemed to attract more downvotes. I have spent years with x86 + MIPS assembly language, C, C++, C#, Visual Basic and Q[uick]BASIC; months with Java, Scheme, Python, PHP; days/weeks with AS3, HaXE, Erlang, Scala, E, Objective-C, Ruby, Delphi, Pascal, Concurrent Clean, Prolog, ADA. I've probably missed a few.

My point is (a) I'm not a lazy developer that doesn't enjoy learning new things or experimenting with new languages and (b) I have found a great ecosystem in .NET and C# and I've been around the block; at first sight I simply cannot see a compelling reason to invest more of my increasingly limited time into learning Go.

If Go has great new vision or compelling difference from other languages then why isn't it there on the homepage at golang.org jumping out at me? All I see are technical details and a huge guide. While I applaud clear, detailed documentation, I'm not going to read through that documentation unless I have some idea of the payoff. I just spent half of my weekend researching and investigating a ton of message brokers for my current project because there's value in the outcome. Researching a new programming language needs to have a huge payoff, or I need to have lots of free time (which unfortunately I don't).

There is absolutely nothing to sell me on the language on the homepage, or in the OP's blog post, and nothing to distinguish it from the 10s of other new languages out there. The FAQ touches on the fact that e.g. it's not object-oriented but not WHY. It just mentions "interfaces" and says "we believe". So I'll have to go and play with it and build something substantial to find out what they might be talking about. The goals mentioned in the FAQ are really not interesting (have you read it?) - perhaps the ideas around concurrency are convenient but they are limited in scope and don't directly address the more complex concurrency issues better than my current platform that I'm facing while I build a web crawler.

To be clear once again: It may be that Go is absolutely amazing and awesome... but if I had to spent days looking into every new language that pops up on the Internet I would never get anything done, and this is the point I was trying to convey in response to the parent's post. It's still on my list to look into but I just don't have a week to commit to what looks like quite a lot to manually digest.



Given all the languages you already programmed with, and given that the Go specification is relatively short (approximately the same as Scheme), maybe you overestimate the efforts it would require to learn it. But you don't need to, that's all fine.


Heh I think you inadvertently proved my point. I spent 6 months with Scheme, working through half of the SICP for personal growth. Just because the specification is simple it doesn't mean the patterns and lessons are straightforward, and I'm a pretty slow learner. If you read the Go FAQ you will note that about 1/3 of it is along the lines of "Why doesn't Go...". When I see that sort of language it's clear that between the lines there's a lot to learn, and the only way for me to learn a language is to write code.

But after all of this I think I'm going to have to write one of my site-specific crawlers in Go for fun; since Go has a STOMP binding it should be easy to integrate into my existing architecture. Where things will get interesting is finding a compatible serialization library (and so we start getting into the real world problems of using a new language to solve interesting problems... hopefully one of the .NET protocol buffer implementations will work correctly with the one I imagine exists for Go).


> hopefully one of the .NET protocol buffer implementations will work correctly with the one I imagine exists for Go

That's one of the primary points of protocol buffers ;-)


you have nailed wisdom to these younger 16 years old crowd. But nowadays younger crowd needs fashion,pizzaz,Prestige etc. in my experience learning about Message Brokers is very important than learning new language.




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