Green vs. Brown Programming Languages
I think there's a lot of truth to this, but I'm going to make an additional suggestion that I'll readily admit is biased by my own feelings:<p>I think Go is in a honeymoon phase and people will hate it in 10 years; I think Rust will continue to be liked even when it's a legacy language (perhaps no language can continue being <i>loved</i> once it becomes "brown", but I think Rust will be a lot less dreaded than others).<p>Go, like Ruby (mentioned at the end of the article), is optimized for <i>building</i>. You can do things quickly and easily with minimal ceremony. Some people love that. But that's exactly the trait that's starting to weigh on Ruby, and it's exactly the trait that has put PHP and Perl in the "dread" category over time (remember when people were in love with those?).<p>Rust on the other hand is optimized for <i>maintaining</i> (it's right there in the name: software should be allowed to become old and "collect rust"). Rust APIs are very hard to misuse, everything is constrained and specified very explicitly. Documentation and testing live inline with your code. You know exactly what a piece of code can and can't do - you even know whether it's allowed to mutate an object you're passing it. And of course certain mistakes are impossible to make at all without (again, explicitly) dipping into unsafe { }.<p>This kind of forethought is what makes a language that survives the honeymoon phase.