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Why is Golang popular in China?

herman.asia

51–60 of 114 posts

Re: Why is Golang popular in China?

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking generally, not specific to golang, but no serious programmers will use non-ASCII identifiers. Why? I think the main reason is that it's a hassle to input Chinese characters.

You do know that there are programmers that live outside of English speaking countries that use non-standard US layout right :) http://www.dcothai.com/download/lowkey.gif http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/Keyboard_...

I think it's beyond nationalism. Programming is done in english because its the common tongue, and the world in which programmers grow is distributed and quasi-borderless, so there's interest in using a tongue common to all. There's no point in not writing code in english, it's a self defeating endeavor.

I'm from a non English speaking nation and I originally used an non-standard US layout, although I changed to US layout when I realized doing otherwise was an exercise in futility.

Re: Why is Golang popular in China?

#52
post #41

The anwser is ECUG[1]: formerly Erlang China User Group to promoting Erlang programming, now days changed itself to 'Effective Cloud User Group' for a border definition. ECUG is a online community also it host an annual ECUG conference. Golang was first presented in ECUGConf2011 by xushiwei[2], he was building a dropbox clone(qbox.com) in Golang, now qbox become qiniu.com which is the most successful S3 clone in Chin…

upvote.

Re: Why is Golang popular in China?

#53

Whoa wait a second, I feel like this is burying the lead: you can write native android apps in go [1]. I feel like that's a very big deal, especially for game companies wanting native speed, and a 'modern' language and toolkit. [1] E.g. http://talks.golang.org/2014/gothamgo-android.slide#1

Thought it might interest you that the term is "burying the lede". One of those weird terms like "champing at the bit" or "eke out a living" that uses a word that sounds like a modern English word but is actually a slightly arcane word. In this case lede is "the introductory section of a news story that is intended to entice the reader to read the full story".

Maybe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_paragraph

Re: Why is Golang popular in China?

#54

I live in China, I think Go is becoming popular in China. Many Coders are talking about it and compare Go with Erlang or C++. In fact there are lots of debates in Chinese community about Go and Erlang such as this link http://www.zhihu.com/question/27465406 . Also many programmers are talking about Go and Erlang in weibo -- a chinese website that is similar to twitter. Finally, because of the Great Fire Wall has bloc…

是的。

It means "Yes it is." according to Google Translate.

Re: Why is Golang popular in China?

#55
Come from china, a golang user, for 2 years now.

golang.org and Google is blocked in china by government, so, Google trends and golang.org traffic from China maybe miss leading.

Go is quite popular in china, the reasons can be:

1. A few companies is based on Golang, like qiniu.com. 2. More and more companies are adopting Golang, since it's very powerful for writing network servers. These companies are facing very fast traffic growth. Golang's efficiency and expressiveness are well known. It just fills the gap. 3. China has many software developers spread in a few cities(Beijing, Shanhai, Hangzhou, etc). News spread quite effective among them.

Re: Why is Golang popular in China?

#56
post #4

Could it be because golang supports unicode identifiers? For non-native English speakers, it must be more difficult to program in ASCII-based languages, right?

Certainly not for that reason. Actually, as a non-native English speaker, I consider unicode identifiers one of the most useless features for a language.

There are reasons why unicode identifiers have never been widely used, and probably will never be, even though they've been around for more than a decade:

1. You're unlikely to be allowed to use them. Unicode identifiers stagger international collaboration. Do you want your Chinese colleague to commit some hieroglyphical identifiers into your code, and then an Arabic colleague to add right-to-left curvatures? I doubt that :) They are unwanted in outsourcing, freelancing, open-source, any company which does foreign hire, they are a problem when asking on StackOverflow, etc.

2. There is just no problem to use English in the first place. Programmers already use English every day. 80-100% of information (documentation, QA, discussion forums) on any programming topic is in English; native-language sources are lacking at best, often nonexistent. If person is a professional programmer, it's way too late for them to have a couple of words translated.

3. They are not as appealing as you might think. Many languages don't work the same way as English. For example, in expression `print(line)` the word `line` may have to have different morphological form than in `var line = ...`, and yet another form for `if '_' in line`; one form for all uses is very unnatural and requires getting used to (and if you're going to adjust anyway, why not adjust to English then).

4. Mixed-language text is simply harder to type when second alphabet is not latin. It's like 3x harder when foreign words need to be inserted. I have even seen colleagues discussing code in chat using English just for that reason. And since at least language keywords and standard libraries are already using English, mixed is what it gonna be. A person must have some real serious trouble with English to tolerate that.

Even in strictly local projects where all comments are in native language, unicode identifiers are rarely used.

P.S. When I was reading Swift book about unicode identifiers, I immediately thought: "first paragraph of every Swift coding conventions on the planet is going to be, don't use unicode identifiers".

Re: Why is Golang popular in China?

#57
Maybe github is more convinced, search Go in github and filter by language use go: https://github.com/search?l=Go&o=desc&q=go&s=stars&type=Repo... . You will find half of popular repos (stars>3000) are created by Chinese developer. And most of popular Go related project's document has complete Chinese translation.

Re: Why is Golang popular in China?

#58
I recall reading a similar post about Node.js a few years ago. For what it's worth, it might just be that China's programming community is growing (and interacting more with the West). The Alexa map is actually not too dissimilar from a population by country map.

If I had to hypothesise about golang in particular, I'd say it might have something with Docker (Baidu is using Docker for its PaaS for example) although it's difficult to say if the relationship is the other way around.

Re: Why is Golang popular in China?

#59
post #4

Could it be because golang supports unicode identifiers? For non-native English speakers, it must be more difficult to program in ASCII-based languages, right?

Certainly not for that reason. Actually, as a non-native English speaker, I consider unicode identifiers one of the most useless features for a language. There are reasons why unicode identifiers have never been widely used, and probably will never be, even though they've been around for more than a decade: 1. You're unlikely to be allowed to use them. Unicode identifiers stagger international collaboration. Do you w…

I agree, but I think we live in an idealist bubble on Hacker News. Some of my freelancing clients maintain a bit of (Unicode free) English-German code.

What would you do if you had to write one of the gazillion business software systems we never see here on HN, and you had to codify boring terms like Boolean rightToGiveExtraordinaryNoticeOfTermination (in any other language)? The client/superior has not provided you with an English translation, and your English is mediocre. I can see how non-English code is the least evil in this situation.

I have also inherited outsourced code from Russia once and it had Russian (cyrillic) comments above every English identifier, so apparently some people don't mind switching between keyboard layouts while typing :)

Re: Why is Golang popular in China?

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

可能是因为:一是Google在中国开发者心中的地位。二是Golang的语法与C有一定渊源,并且简单、面向对象。中国计算机专业学生的入门语言一般是C。三是Golang的库专业、强大。

Translation: This is probably because 1) Google has a special place in the hearts of Chinese developers. 2) Golang came from the same roots as C,is simple, has OOP features etc. Most Chinese computer science students' first language is C. 3) Golang has a large and specialized library.

> Google has a special place in the hearts of Chinese developers

Why is this? Is it because of Android or something else?

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