OP here. It is absolutely true that we did not rewrite the entire original system in Go; I tried to be very explicit about that in the blog post. But, I feel confident that it could be done, in much less code, with greater clarity and modularization. The Go language by itself does not force good software design. A rewrite in any language would have been better than the original system, but our decision to use Go turned out to be fortuitous in that we managed to do so in record time and with much greater programmer productivity.
Was there anything about the language that you found particularly forced clarity and modularity? I'm giving a talk comparing Go and Ruby next month and I'm curious as to what people with experience with larger Go programs find to be most helpful.
The Go module system for sure. Also I really like Go's interface model (as opposed to Java or C++ classes) as it is more flexible and in some ways more precise. Note that I don't know Ruby so I can't compare Go to that...
Thanks for the article, it was a very interesting read! Since this always comes up in Go discussions: did you miss generics in this project or was the lack of generics a non-issue?
