this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2025
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And yet we write giant web applications in frameworks like django and ExpressJS
Honestly I'm surprised Golang hasn't taken off more.
Because programmer hourly pay is way higher than server hourly cost. Abundant nodejs developers can pump shitty code faster, therefore delivering features faster. That’s all shareholders care about.
See, in not so sure about that. Go has a lot of issues, things it doesn't do well, but one thing it is good at is being simple. I would argue that it's certainly not more complex than JavaScript, and in many cases, is easier simply because there are fewer "gotcha" edge cases that impact new developers. And Go is slowly eliminating those gotchas (such as the loop variable shadowing issue).
Your argument holds for Rust v JS; the Rust learning curve is higher, and you have to understand many more technical computing topics to write good code. But I don't think the same holds for Go. Anyone capable of learning JS is capable of learning Go, in nearly the same time.
Maybe you're saying that there's a veritable legion of JS script monkeys, and so it's cheaper because of supply and demand. I'd agree with that. JS programming skills are certainly far more fungible between companies, which encourages new developers to choose it. I just don't think it has as much to do with language complexity or difficulty.
There’s also Dart with its similar syntax to JS, strong type and null safety, and ahead of time compilation with hot reload. And yet it only really started getting adoption after being chosen as the language for Flutter.