Sure, some people are productive in it and that's fine - but for those of us who have worked in better languages taking the step down is unattractive.
> Personally I couldn't live without generics, and would never choose a language that doesn't have them
I'm kind of confused here. Yes, Go needs generics, but are generics even that key a feature? I mean how often do you have to define a generic type, and how much copying does it really take? Is it a hassle? Of course. But at the end of the matter, Go much, much better when it comes to combining expressibility, efficiency, and simplicity then many of the other options available today.
The thing that makes it painfully obvious to me that Rob Pike hasn't bothered to learn anything from the PL community is that Go has nil. That just shouldn't happen in a modern language.
I think that's a little bit unfair, since Go introduces many powerful ideas not (traditionally) available in Java or C++: namely first class concurrency and functional primitives. Its handling of typing, the ability to define types not necessarily based on structs, the excellent design of interfaces are other examples. Go is an extremely powerful and expressive language that opens up the doors for programming in new paradigms, while making it easy to maintain readability and simplicity.
Fair point with the nil issue, I think that's one of Go's other weaknesses. But it does make up for that with its excellent error handling paradigm.
If it came from "Joe the dev" no one at HN would give it a second look.
I believe it is thriving because it was well-designed, by extremely influential individuals, and the early library work was stellar. Also, several other experienced and influential programmers tried it, and expressed something along the lines of "programming is fun again!"
Inside Google, the two main programming languages are C++ and Java, not Go (at least when I left, in September). The Go tooling is generally less capable, but the interfaces smaller, and often nicer: they have the dual benefits of hindsight, and a small but very smart team that really cares about conciseness and clean APIs.
Of course, it's undeniable that the Google name helps a bit. And paying a team of very experienced (and presumably very expensive) developers to work on it makes a huge difference. But I think it would be as successful if those same developers were sponsored by Redhat, or Apple, or just about anyone.
It's like Go's creators haven't even read Pierce's Types and Programming languages. This is inexcusable. Even more so from Rob Pike and Ken Thomson —you'd expect better from such big shots.
