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briansole
briansole

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Why hasn’t Go overtaken Python in popularity?

#go

If you just heard about Go, you may wonder if it's so great, why don't we see it everywhere?

In this post I'll try to answer that question from my own perspective. Let me know if you agree or disagree. Don't forget to smash the like :P

Domain knowledge

In many domains, Python is the default language. Like in data mining or machine learning, where you need to do all kinds of operations with the data (slicing, models etc).

By choosing Python you can take advantage of the existing code bases and development community. This is what many developers do.

Go was designed to build robust systems to scale, like micro services. That's when you could choose to go for Go, but for many developers Go requires a little bit of work to understand.

Performance

Then there's those who need the performance of Go, but that will use C/C++ instead because they learned that a long time ago.

If you have network-centric programs (micro services and so on) or high-concurrency programs, it may be the best solution.

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shiraazm profile image
Shiraaz Moollatjie

You also have to consider that many students are taught Python at the university level, whereas this is not the case with Go. I think that this is a very important aspect to language adoption.