Why you PHP guys should learn Golang

Why you PHP guys should learn Golang
mikespook.com

Go is not a particularly hard language for the level it's designed at (though I'm not sure that remembering keywords is really a primary usability concern for any language)... but if you are just trying to slap together a web app and feel intimidated by deploy details and want to use cheap shared hosting and plug into existing libraries as much as possible, Go is somewhere between inconvenient and totally infeasible.

I'm not saying Go is a bad choice... there are good reasons to look at it, particularly if you intend to work at a somewhat lower level (e.g. for performance) and want some of Go's benefits (like the concurrency model, or some of the benefits of static typing and compiling without so much time or effort on managing dependencies as you would otherwise spend, etc.)

I'm saying the priorities which would make PHP attractive would tend to make Go quite unattractive. I can certainly see how PHP programmers (like many other programmers) can benefit from learning another language with abilities complementary to what they already know.

Even if we supposed that PHP beginners all outgrew it after one year, there are enough people always picking it up that you would still always have PHP programmers, until there was enough of a cultural shift that people stopped picking it up. (Unlikely since PHP's virtues or apparent virtues to newbies are many, and whatever its problems it is still a viable way to build things)

Second, even if PHP is a relatively bad tool in some important ways - if you actively push your abilities as you log many hours, your knowledge will improve. And without specific numbers, PHP is certainly among the most popular languages for web work (if not the single most popular one). So we can expect there are a large number of people who have grown up in PHP and have therefore gained some level of technical maturity even if they are using a bad tool (actually, struggling successfully with bad tools might help develop certain muscles useful in areas like maintenance coding).

People are PHP programmers not because they are stupid, but because that is what first worked for them and they haven't had the time or reason to change yet, or it's where their job is, or because they just have bad taste ;)

(that's a joke, I do mean to say that matters of taste are involved though)

But some of his reasons that Go may be better or more useful than PHP don't really stick. You can deploy a PHP web application using the PHAR format, which is a lot like just moving a file into a folder. And static variable typing isn't really a requirement for a successful language if you're adequately validating input and the like.

Also, a PHP programmer would have an easier time learning another scripting language compared to another compiled language, regardless of the overhead of configuring a development environment.

Things that would make me consider Go would include ease of deployment, significant speed improvements, fantastic libraries for the kinds of things I want to get done, or smart under-the-hood concurrency that I don't personally have to worry about coding. Go could have all these things, and I've have no idea from this post.