Why I went from Python to Go (and not node.js)

no, you got it. It's not really meant to be a criticism of Python itself, it's just behavior that is common among 20-something web developers, which is representative of some areas of the industry, and is specifically the target audience for the post. You know, the kind of developer that is advanced enough that they can build non-trivial projects, but not experienced enough to have wisdom forged in the furnaces of years of industry experience (that's ... me and a lot of other HN users). The same type of attitude can be found in all languages and isn't specific to the Python community; the specific swipes at other languages are just what you get if you apply that attitude to Python. Judging people by the tools they use is a pretty useless metric.

>For the record, I think Haskell is a strictly superior choice to Go

I'm pretty sure it's the best programming language, that's why I put them in the gray-beard category. Or maybe it's OCaml or some Lisp dialect; it doesn't really matter. It's even why I further apologized to Dons and acknowledged that Haskell programmers tend to be able to solve harder problems than other programmers I know, but even after I twice acknowledged the superiority of Haskell, he basically just looked at me and said "you're a stupid idiot, and by the way, look at how many numbers I can compute with my superior Haskell program that runs on a lot of machines". Uh, ok, that's cool... I guess.

But every time I sit down with Haskell programmers and they explain to me how elegant their code is, I just don't really care. It's not what makes me interested in computer programming. I don't really care to use the best programming language; I really only care to make the best programs. PHP (and other shit technologies) have shown us that you don't need to understand monads to make people happy.

A friend of mine, who is a very strong programmer that I have a tremendous amount of respect for professionally, once showed me how to use Coq to prove that multiplication is commutative. I found that very boring, and it didn't make me want to learn Coq. Mind you, I spend between 40 and 60 hours a week working with software. I'm in it because I like to build things that are useful to people, and I think software is a great creative medium. I think that's a fairly common attitude.

Every time I say the name Haskell I am sorry for it, because every time I say the name Haskell I am met with bitter condescension. It makes me sad that despite talking about having experience with seven programming languages in my post, or mentioning having built a variety of things that are very different, Haskell programmers consistently treat me like I am a stupid person. So I'm glad you're not like that, and I'm glad that you understood I didn't mean to dismiss Haskell on technical grounds. Thank you for your comment.

I think everything you've mentioned is pretty defensible, particularly the readability bit. Honestly if a language does everything reasonably well, I think that's pretty awesome. I'm also curious what magical dynamically-typed interpreted language you prefer. The only mainstream general-purpose alternatives I can think of are Ruby (which is basically alternate-universe python) and Perl (which seems strictly worse), or are you into JavaScript or APL-derivatives? It's all a matter of taste of course, but I could probably write a much more vicious rant against any of those.

Out of all the languages I've tried--and I've tried a decent amount--Haskell is by far the most productive. I can write my programs faster and they come out shorter, more readable, more maintainable and easier to test. I've found it far easier to go back to old Haskell code I've written than old Java or JavaScript or Perl or even Python code. All this without significantly sacrificing performance.

I've also found Haskell far easier to refactor. In most languages, my projects' code size goes up monotonically; in Haskell, it isn't rare for me to both add a feature and make the code shorter! This was a surprise the first couple of times, but now I almost expect it.

Also, critically, I've found Haskell's advantages scale superlinearly with the complexity of the problem. That is, the harder a problem is conceptually, the bigger the advantage of using Haskell over another language. Haskell actually helps me think about the problem, even if I don't want to write a program for it. I've certainly found certain tasks far easier even in other languages by thinking in Haskell terms about things like nondeterminism.

This may seem counter-intuitive, but I've even found Haskell to be very good for prototyping. Once you get used to the slightly different style of thinking it requires, the type system actually starts helping you develop solutions quickly. I'm sure other languages may be better at this than Haskell, but Haskell really shines when it's time to take your prototype and transition to a solid piece of software--it makes the refactoring much easier and makes even significant architectural changes more approachable.

The real problem is that Haskell, for whatever reason, has the rather unfair reputation of being impractical. Really nothing could be further from the truth--yes, there is plenty of theory and research in the language, but this is not there just for fun: it actually makes the language better to use, even for more mundane tasks!

You definitely don't need to understand monads to make people happy, but it certainly helps. In practice, as PHP has shown :P, you really don't need to understand much of anything to do awesome stuff. And yet we all still heavily recommend encapsulation and testing and code reuse and so on; the Haskell philosophy is just a systematic extension of this.

I think Haskell's widely spread reputation as just an academic curiosity makes some people a little defensive--and well it should! But never take it personally. It's just a little annoying for an immensely practical and productive language to be cast aside simply because it derives its efficiency from a well-founded theoretical basis.