alt Hacker NewsPhilosophical question, but after reaching critical mass, should languages even aspire to more? I.e. do you risk becoming "master of none"? What's wrong with specialist languages? I.e. best of breed vs best of suite?
I agree with author Go is getting squeezed, but it has its use cases. "COBOL of could native" implies it's not selected for new things, but I reach for it frequently (Go > Java for "enterprise software" backends, Go > others for CLI tools, obviously cloud native / terraform / CI ecosystem, etc.).
However in "best of suite" world, ecosystem interop matters. C <> Go is a pain point. As is WASM <> Go. Both make me reach for Rust.
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Look at PHP. Every year people say PHP got much better then in the dark ages.
Yes it got rid of it's rough edges. People solely look positive at it because it has become more familiar with mainstream OOP languages. But it has no identity anymore. It is still simpler for the web then most competitors, but it doesn't matter because you install 30 packages for an hello world anyway. The community doesn't want simplicity, they want easy, with glorious looking code.
The irony is that PHP is perceived more attractive by coders, but it's so generic now, that a newbie is unlikely to choose it.
> should languages even aspire to more?
Some should, maybe. But Go said right from day one that it doesn't aspire to be anything more than a language that appears dynamically-typed with static-type performance for the creation of network servers. It has no reason to. It was very much built for a specific purpose.
It has found other uses, but that was a surprise to its creators.
> Go is getting squeezed
Is it? I don't really see anything new that is trying to fill the same void. There are older solutions that are still being used, but presumably more would use them if Go hadn't been invented. So it is Go doing the squeezing, so to speak.