From what I've heard, TJ is working with Go because Joyent wasn't putting enough effort into releasing features for node and he also got tired of JavaScript callbacks. I think node will see some love very soon, and I know there are plenty of ways to deal with callback hell. That's just one guy's feeling. I really love working with node. But definitely looking forward some new features.
There are lots of reasons! I'd encourage people to try something new (Go, Rust, Scala, whatever), it's easy to ignore Node's shortcomings sometimes. Community was a big one for me, the "unixy" nature of node+npm is no good when the module quality is pretty poor and the names are completely nonsensical, your app just becomes an abstract blob of code that makes no sense. Go's stdlib is pretty rock solid, nothing in Node comes close IMO.
Having just spent more time at work this week creating PR for bugs in npm modules, instead of doing actual work... I'm starting to agree.
But honestly I think that's just par for the course for any substantially popular language. I don't think Go (or any other language) is inherently immune to this.
What kind of problems are you having with it? I'm using npm on Windows and it's working out great! I'm actually using it as my build/task runner rather than using bloated grunt or gulp. It's easy to configure and read. I run my linter, unit test, jscs, and bundler all configured in package.json.
I also install git bash and conemu to have bash on Windows which makes things much better. I don't use windows console.
My experience is that Npm "kinda works" on Windows. There are mysterious race-conditions and annoying bugs. And I'm not even talking about npm being technically completely incompatible with Windows due to the 256 character path limitation.
I'm having a hard time enjoying Go. It just reminds me a little too much of Java, and I programmed in that language for way too long. After I finished my test program, I uninstalled the toolkit from my system. Right now, I feel that there's no perfect language for me. I do love JavaScript, but there are some things I wish they'd fix. And it takes browser makers way too long to support the latest features. Been messing around with Erlang. Kind of an interesting language.
Maybe you don't like programming? Or you did once, but you've grown bored with it now that it's not as challenging?
In my opinion, a programming language is good if it enables the programmer to move from a concept to correct and maintainable implementation with minimal friction. I don't expect a programming language to entertain me.
The burden is then on me to find projects that I believe in and will enjoy implementing. This is, of course, easier said then done.
No, I actually do like programming. And I agree with you that there's more to choosing a language than having fun with it. I've had to make that decision for 2 decades. :) But my idea of fun is when I find a language that does a lot with less code, easy to apply patterns, doesn't have a lot of boilerplate, doesn't take a lot of tooling, simple, sleek, and allows any style of programming (e.g. oop, functional, procedural). Like I said, I've tried Go and it just didn't feel like that. It felt like, well, Java. The language I used to build apps in the 90s.
Any modern Lisp gets you there. The three leading dialects, namely Common Lisp, Racket, and Clojure, are all excellent. Each makes different trade-offs in what it offers. As a former Java programmer, you will probably like Clojure's near-perfect Java interop and excellent performance. Racket is probably the best batteries-included language and environment available today. Common Lisp is a bit grandfatherly, but it's the kind of grandfather who teaches you to fly his aerobatics plane. Its condition system, in particular, should be required study to anyone who purports to design languages and runtimes.
I read up and played with Rust earlier this week. It's also excellent, and while it's too young and has been too volatile for libraries to solidify, that will change in the next few months. The tooling (as far as Emacs modes and the dependency/build system, Cargo, are concerned) looks solid. Performance is already decent, and has the potential to eventually match C. To be honest, Rust feels like what Go would have been had its authors understood Lisp and Haskell.
