Google Go Capturing Developer Interest

angry tapir writes with news that Google Go seems to be cutting a wide swath through the programming community in just a short time since its early, experimental release. While Google insists that Go is still a work in progress (like so many of their offerings), many developers are so intrigued by the feature set that they are already implementing many noncritical applications with it. What experiences, good or bad, have you had with Google Go, and how likely is it to really take over?

Comments

Oh yeah, that ...

[checkitout]

Until this article, I forgot it was ever announced.

Re:Oh yeah, that ...

[TheLink]

Me too. I'll wait for those captured developer(s) to develop more libraries for it first.

A programming language that's "powerful" for the code you write is good for those uber-programmers.

A programming language that's "powerful" for the code you no longer have to write is for those crappy programmers like me :).

Many promising programming languages make it to the first category but never make it to the second.

"many developers are so intrigued"

[Anonymous Coward]

Translation: Someone is drumming up some marketing astroturf for a single-company controlled proprietary language.

Re:"many developers are so intrigued"

[MrBandersnatch]

"At least Java's main benefit was portability."

Write once, test everywhere?

Re:"many developers are so intrigued"

[FlyingBishop]

That's inevitable. It's certainly better than write everywhere, test everywhere.

Re:"many developers are so intrigued"

[TheLink]

Perl and python are quite portable too, though not as portable as Java.

But in practice many nontrivial programs end up with so many dependencies that they aren't that portable anymore.

For example, say you want to write a program to record video from a video camera and audio from a sound device. And you want to cater for the possibility of more than one selectable camera and sound device.

Even if you write it in java, you're going to have to do different things depending on whether it runs on Windows, OSX or Ubuntu.

Why? Little things like figuring out which is the user's default recording device, and using it might be different on different platforms.

Or in theory it's supposed to work, but currently the current Java release for the current OS release is buggy, so the workaround meantime is "...".

If you want a polished end product you have to take care of stuff like that.

Re:"many developers are so intrigued"

[BitZtream]

I run into more portability issues with Python than I ever have with Java, and thats just between Windows and Linux, the same could be said for Ruby. I haven't dug deep enough into perl to say the same for it. I avoid TCL ever since I stopped using eggdrop, vile creature that it is.

I've written a little python, a lot of ruby, and a fair amount of java, it beats both those others for cross platform issues in my experience, and I'm ignoring Ruby on DOS as thats a whole new set of issues and isn't really even a fair comparison since the OS is so far different, I don't think there is a DOS JVM, and I have no idea about python and DOS.

I absolutely HATED Java apps before I was forced to start writing Java code myself. What I learned VERY rapidly is that Java apps suck if you're a shitty programmer. If you don't have any clue how to write code and no clue about the common pitfalls of cross platform dev, it can kill you. 9 times out of 10, its because the programmer did stupid shit that he/she shouldn't have that is clearly OS specific when its a cross platform compatibility issue. Likewise all the slow beasts of Java 'apps' that you come across generally suck because the programmers have no idea what they are doing. Stupid crap like doing string concatenation one character at a time using a string variable rather than class designed for string concatenation and proper allocation for it.

Java isn't the problem. Much like VB, shitty Java programmers are the problem. Java and to a much larger extent, VB draw in people who aren't programmers because of the marketing, and then we see tons of crappy Java apps because the language is in fact, TOO easy to use.

Say what you want about Java in the past, it could be true. Today? Muh, there is very little if any truth in your statements at this point in time.

Bright future to go.

[zeromorph]

It is an interesting concept for a low-level language and could be pretty important. And since the gccgo compiler has been accepted by the gcc steering committee (link), I am expecting Go to stay and prosper.

Bad infomercial

[captaindomon]

This summary reads like a bad infomercial. "How likely is it to really take over?" not likely at all, and nobody would ask that question unless they worked for Google Marketing.

Re:Go fuck yourself

[cmiller173]

30 years ago there were enough programming languages "already". What do you need that can't be handled by COBOL, FORTRAN, Pascal, Ada, ANSI C and assembly language?

Eh?

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

angry tapir writes with news that Google Go seems to be cutting a wide swath through the programming community

He may write that, but that's not what the article says:

While Go is still a work in progress, some developers are so encouraged by its features and design that they have started using it to build noncritical application

What experiences, good or bad, have you had with Google Go, and how likely is it to really take over?

Um, take over what? Is this a serious question? The answer here is "never" -- for the same reason that no single language will ever "take over" the software development landscape. There is no one tool fit for every job.