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eddythompson80 • today at 2:48 AM • 0 replies • view on HN

Others have mentioned the main issues, but to add; you often end up writing “ugly” code to do basic concurrency operations. Often setting up channels or workgroups then a `go func {}(…); wg.Wait();` just feels wrong and makes you thing “I must be doing something wrong, there must a better way, but that’s IS the way. It’s just go syntax quirks at the end of the day, and makes you appreciate go’s simplicity over high abstractions.

In my experience the main hurdle was getting developers on the team onboard with go’s way. It felt like swimming upstream for my 6 year stint in go. I was in a very Java heavy “enterprise” but we were writing a kubernetes operator and I pushed to use golang because (a) I liked it, and (b) it was 2019 and the entire kubernetes ecosystem was primarily go.

To me golang was very simple and I drank Rob Pike’s and Google’s narrative of how easy it’s to get a competent “compute science major in college”-person to pick up go. What I experienced was a form of “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”. Lazy (and I hate to use this word) developers who gotten so used to frameworks and IDEs doing all the heavy lifting for them in Java or C# had 0 appetite forgetting all the questionable patterns they learned over the years and adopt Go’s simplicity. It was very frustrating at time, yet gave me a good eye for the actual skilled talent in the organization vs the average enterprise developer persona.