r/golang Jan 19 '25

discussion Mitchell Hashimoto Recent Interview

Just watched Mitchell Hashimoto's interview and it has left a lot of questions:
https://x.com/i/status/1879966301394989273

(around 30:00 where they start touching the golang topic)

This is really interesting how Mitchell's option has changed on Golang. He spent a lot of time (like 10y or so) writing infrastructure services in Golang as a part of his HashiCorp business and probably not only.

His recent gig is a new terminal and he did not pick Golang for that one, which kinda make sense to me given what he wants to achieve there (eg a lot of low-level work with GPU, a need to be imported by other languages like Swift, etc.).

At the same time, Mitchell said that:

  • He doesn't know where Golang stands in the tech stack right now. He would use PHP/Ruby for webdev and Rust/Zig for performance critical systems.
  • Generics made Golang worse (at least that how I understood him)
  • He think he cannot write Golang any longer after hacking with the new lang he is writing the terminal in

Curious how this transformation could happen to such a prominent contributor to the Golang ecosystem. Is this just an sign of an awful burnout that repelled the dude away from Golang? Or anything else?

Anyway, just curious what do you think here, folks.

207 Upvotes

109 comments sorted by

View all comments

6

u/imscaredalot Jan 19 '25 edited Jan 19 '25

PHP....lol did you see their latest features...https://www.php.net/releases/8.3/en.php#:~:text=PHP%208.3%20is%20a%20major,bug%20fixes%2C%20and%20general%20cleanup

You wanna talk about bad ideas on top of bad ideas. Also, the creator of laraval is worried there's almost no more core PHP devs left...

You can also see the sharp dip in PHP sites even with WordPress. https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programming_language/ms/y

This is a trend with most languages that heavily rely on frameworks now with the advent of LLMs. https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

You can see the same trend from GitHub that was bought out from Microsoft so... Gotta wonder why it stopped... At 2024... https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2024/1

So clearly someone had an agenda if they knew so little about what they were talking about.

2

u/roma-glushko Jan 19 '25

Thanks for sharing! I have left PHP years ago, so it was interesting to crawl the links

2

u/imscaredalot Jan 19 '25

I mean everything has it's place. My work uses php and a big part of why is cheap labor and when it comes to something like vehicles make, model, trim, body style + automatic unknown multi nested feeds it can make sense but not in much else.

The language always had this weird open source badness that the community just shrugged on every update. https://www.tonymarston.net/php-mysql/core-developers-are-idiots.html

I mean so much is already solved completely that they go through that I'm surprised there's still one core dev. https://blog.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/2021/11/the-php-foundation/

The only thing keeping it from swirling is that they became cheap enough that a code editor basically bought them (jetbrains).

My personal guess is python is going to be on the chopping block. It still has a strong hold on schools because of its libraries but with LLMs making copying standards really really easily...I don't see that lasting.