â–² 9 â–¼ Show: Results of the Gopher language poll

GN posted by kenny 2635 days ago  

Golang News ran a poll on twitter in the first week of 2017, with some interesting results. The question was: Which programming language did you use most before learning Go? The results are as follows:

443 Votes cast (including comments)
  • 39.5% Ruby/Python
  • 24% Java/Scala
  • 20% Javascript
  • 13.5% C/C++
  • 3% PHP

This was limited only to those devs on twitter who saw the poll, and the polls there are a bit limited, with only 4 options. So some were combined, (Ruby/Python), and some required write-in replies (like PHP/Scala), which will have skewed results somewhat, however the results are interesting nonetheless and show some clear trends.

While Go was initially conceived to replace languages like C and C++ at Google, perhaps while waiting for a C++ program to compile 😂, it has seen far greater adoption amongst programmers who previously used more dynamic languages like Ruby, Javascript or Python, along with a fair number of people using Java. One surprise here for me was the number of people previously using Javascript - given the recent resurgence in popularity of JS and the still inchoate state of the ecosystem, I didn't expect to see people looking at static compiled languages coming from js.

So this poll indicates the Go community is a polyglot mix of developers coming from a range of languages, but definitely skewed towards users of dynamic languages like Ruby and Python, and with far fewer C or C++ programmers than you might expect (who have probably tended to pick up Rust instead). You can see a similar preponderance of dynamic languages on the X to Go page of the Go wiki. The exception to this is of course Java, where Go has picked up some developers.

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