I remembered my experience learning Go: reading Go language spec for about 2 hours and start being productive. That is not quite possible with other languages, I am afraid.
Go: Ten years and climbing
191–193 of 193 posts
Re: Go: Ten years and climbing
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As a simple language to wire pieces together, Golang is fine, but it really doesn't give you the tools (imo) to be productive for anything more complex than simple apps. It's a great alternative to JS (again imo), but not something I'd like to write. How do you address its popularity in the field of cloud computing then (which I presume you would agree is pretty complex)? This was mentioned in ample detail by Rob i…
The language that appeals to the masses with low barrier to entry in a niche always wins the popularity contest in that domain. I attribute it to herd mentality; assuming skill has a standard distribution, the average developer herd gets a massive head start. You can see the idiot friendly language eclipse in popularity in other domains too even though "better" alternatives exist: - elegant general purpose: python ov…
PHP has some unique design considerations that make it better suited for web. PHP's main significant weaknesses for that domain would be the lack of a strong type system, lack of strong event based server ecosystem (what reactphp does, nodejs, golang, etc.), and it's slower than Java. It has multiple popular long supported rails alternatives. Python and Ruby have nothing over PHP for web development. PHP has the absolute best first class support for isolated http request handling, live updating only challenged by erlang, standard library designed entirely around webdev, great tooling for building c extensions, widespread cpanel hosting, and composer (pip is garbage compared to composer).
So while you might like ruby/python because it's prettier or because PHP 4 was awful, the idea that one of them is a better web language is totally laughable. If you asked me to define a language better than PHP for web applications, I would have you a long list not even considering python and ruby.