I am a senior java developer in the cloud/distributed arch/ microservice area.
I’ve touched on golang in the past, but not learnt it in any formal/extensive way.
I see it cropping up in many java/microservice positions, and I’m curious if this is at some point going to overtake java in my area.
The current benchmarks seem to suggest that if autoscaling is key to your services, golang is the way to, well, go.
I looked at the job market and it doesn’t yet seem to have taken over, but I’m curious how this is likely to play out over the next decade and if quakus for example is likely to become more competitive against golang. Interestingly, golang specific roles on average pay less than java ones in my area.
Let me know your thoughts or if you have any good articles / content on the subject.
My impression has been that it’s not a good language. That relatively many people try it out, because the initial learning curve is small, only to fall out of love with it hard a few months later, because the low language complexity results in high complexity of each individual codebase.
Perhaps the most elaborate rant about that experience: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/i-want-off-mr-golangs-wild-ride
And yeah, personally I care a lot about being able to work with good tooling, so that’s my reason to stay away from it as long as I don’t need it for employment.
But our industry famously loves terrible languages (see JavaScript, Python, PHP etc.), so if you are just interested in employability, I do imagine that you will continue to find jobs a few years from now. I certainly also feel like it’s well established in ops tooling and cloud services, so there’s gonna be people who continue to write new software with golang in those fields.