It was our opinion that it's harder to write code that will be shared with a bigger team. Some of the factors were the simpler type system, lack of generics meant lots of copy and pasting of common patterns. The package system seemed less comprehensive and flexible in comparison to Java's. These are just subjective issues of course, but I think it's reaching a bit to say that Go and Swift are the best two languages you can learn.
Not a go fan, but seems like if anyone has scale problems, google would, and go would give them these issues too which is surprising since that was kind of the goal to solve from their perspective.
There's different definitions of scale. He is talking about from an engineering perspective and at Google we have seen nothing other than a few periphery sites being written in Go.
I fully agree that Go is a poor language if you are building a large, monolithic application.
> I fully agree that Go is a poor language if you are building a large, monolithic application.
I find that statement hilarious considering that it was explicitly one of the design considerations[1] for Go. So they either failed massively, or there's a difference in perspective on what a good language for programming in the large is.
From Rob Pike's talk[1]:
> Go was designed to address the problems faced in software development at Google, which led to a language that is not a breakthrough research language but is nonetheless an excellent tool for engineering large software projects.
>I find that statement hilarious considering that it was explicitly one of the design considerations[1] for Go.
That doesn't mean much, if anything. One of the design considerations for Java was "write once, run everywhere" and that didn't turn out that well either.
Most languages make failed or semi-failed promises.
And their idea of addressing software development at scale, might not be 2015's idea of doing the same.
Aside from Google, most other teams I've read using Go are more often than not writing small or medium-sized services, no big applications or highly complicated stuff.
> I find that statement hilarious considering that it was explicitly one of the design considerations[1] for Go.
Isn't it hilarious that a statement from the Go authors could be used as evidence of its awesomeness given how the authors are naturally and heavily biased?
>but seems like if anyone has scale problems, google would
Google doesn't use Go at such large scale though. Some projects here and there, and most of them small for all I've read. The most publicly celebrated ones being a MySQL front-end for YouTube and a caching-layer (?) for Google Downloads. Not exactly earth shattering applications.
My understanding is that beyond the examples you talk about that go is being used extensively in google as a backend glue language for automation and services.
