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Google Trends: Golang is popular in China

by gejjaxxita on 6/6/14, 12:44 AM with 43 comments

  • by beefsack on 6/6/14, 2:09 AM

    It's anecdotal, but I live a fair bit of the time in Guangzhou and noticed a lot of Chinese developers I've met there have taken great interest in Go. The surge in popularity seems to have been since an impressively detailed ebook in Chinese on writing web applications in Go[1] was released a couple of years back now, and remains a very popular project on GitHub.

    It is worth noting though that the most popular languages in China reflect the major languages around the rest of the world, a GitHub search for a very common Chinese character[2] shows that for the Chinese open source community.

    [1] https://github.com/astaxie/build-web-application-with-golang

    [2] https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=%E7%9A%84&ref=cmdform&s=s...

  • by mdda on 6/6/14, 3:40 AM

    Another anecdote : The Kick-Off GoLang Meetup was held in Singapore last night. There was a large Chinese contingent in comparison to other meetups (turnout 20-30, majority Chinese. SingaporeJS turnout 100-150, much more mixed crowd : Where mixed in SG programming seems to usually imply a large number/majority of Western ex-pats).

    The main speaker was the developer behind Beego (https://github.com/astaxie), who showed slides that included usage at Chinese companies, etc). Apparently there are quite a few Chinese on-line gaming companies testing the limits of the language (particularly GC-wise).

  • by yohui on 6/6/14, 3:04 AM

    Google Trends also tracks "Go" (Programming Language) as a topic: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F09gbxjr

    For which the order of regional interest is different and somewhat less lopsided, though China remains an outlier at the top.

    I'm not too sure what the results mean, though. For example, if Google Trends is to be believed, RWBY (an American-made anime-esque web series) is massively popular in Taiwan: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F0vsrh7z

    and Mongolians are incredibly fascinated with Elon Musk: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F03nzf1

    But I'm at a loss to explain how that could be the case.

  • by rakoo on 6/6/14, 6:25 AM

    Remember that the sheer number of people makes all country-based comparisons pointless.

    Here, China has 3 times more searches for Golang but has a more than 100 times bigger population. That would make Go more popular in Sweden... except if you consider that not everyone searches for "golang", which is much more visible when you look at the city-based comparison (a more accurate description of what's happening)

  • by jiyinyiyong on 6/6/14, 4:59 AM

    There are already three Golang-based forums (built with Go, talk about Go) in China. While for Node.js , Ruby, Python, we don't see these many.

    * http://golangtc.com

    * http://studygolang.com

    * http://bbs.go-china.org

    Also to mention, Swift is a surprisingly hot topic in Chinese Developer community:

    * http://swift.sh/

    * http://www.douban.com/group/522213/

    And project on translating Swift was quickly started:

    * https://github.com/numbbbbb/the-swift-programming-language-i...

  • by munimkazia on 6/6/14, 5:08 AM

    Is this probably because of the native unicode support in the language?

  • by vorg on 6/6/14, 6:06 AM

    Check out Groovy's popularity on bintray maven in China. Visit https://bintray.com/groovy/maven/groovy/view/statistics then click country.

    700,000 downloads in the last month, with 646,000 of them from China and only 21,000 from the US and 3000 from Germany, the 3 largest downloading countries.

    Of course the point I'm making is web-based queries aren't enough to ascertain a programming language's adoption.

  • by seanewest on 6/6/14, 6:24 AM

    Why are there no programming languages that use native vocabulary from other spoken languages (e.g. Mandarin)? Couldn't somebody make a coffeescript-like transpiler that converts if/for/which/import etc and library methods like printf/webserver/listen to another language? I would think writing code in a language you might not understand well would be a handicap.

    Example: https://github.com/chanxuehong/wechat

  • by cnbuff410 on 6/6/14, 1:26 AM

    I'm not sure Go is more popular in China than in US. Based on what I heard, The companies using Go is definitely more in US, and it's the same case for online discussion and offline meetups.

    I don't quite get why the search traffic for "Golang" is so much bigger in China, unless there are some companies there use Go in their production in large scale secretly

  • by est on 6/6/14, 2:44 AM

  • by jackyb on 6/6/14, 7:09 AM

    One of the Go developers did say that Go has a big following in China in GopherCon 2014, thanks to Windows.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=u-k...

  • by zhengwy on 6/6/14, 7:32 AM

    Given google now only occupies less than 1% of the search engine market in China[1], it makes even less sense why China's trending is an outlier among all the countries. [1]http://engine.data.cnzz.com/

  • by freeyoru on 6/6/14, 4:17 AM

    I think actually the reason is programming is popular in China. So based on the population (that knows how to write code), eventually all programming languages will appear to be popular in China on Google Trends.

  • by farslan on 6/6/14, 5:42 AM

    I've noticed that too mainly because I see lot's of stargazers for https://github.com/fatih/vim-go to be Chinese people.

  • by closetnerd on 6/6/14, 3:00 AM

  • by jaekwon on 6/6/14, 1:25 AM

    Yeah, I noticed that too. Is it actually the case?

  • by gregimba on 6/6/14, 3:25 AM

    Name collision?

  • by clubhi on 6/6/14, 1:29 AM

    The chinese word for ninja is lang. Hence the phrase "golang". They are just very big Ninja Turtle/Vanilla Ice Fans.