I've worked with both node and Go. There is a lot of hyperbole and fluff points about Go's strengths in the original article (sorry to the author!). Things that are touted as huge wins for Go have equally better things in node. Both platforms are great and they both have appeal for different people.

My eloquent post was eaten by an expired link on the original article but here are some counter-points:

The commutative property applies to all code that has semicolons to end lines. Use jslint/jshint/an IDE. The symbol is "optional" not marked as "leave it out because it makes scripts nicer."

Use jslint/jshint/an IDE to prevent globals. Seriously. It's the same as running go fmt on your code.

Forcing people to use "channels" as a best practice to accomplish scaling is the same as the best practice of callbacks - but yes, channels are nicer to use. Node standard modules require callbacks by default as Go standard library implements channels by default.

32-bit integers in JS don't have float problems because the precision doesn't break

Typing in Go can still be annoying for some situations. If you're dealing with external content (creating an API with mutable content that you still need to read) it can be annoying at best (e.g. reminds me of writing C). Types in Go are a nice implementation though.

npm is way better than go get and there are at least 3 projects in Go trying to replicate npm's ease-of-use

The vim/emacs syntax highlighter is nice but it's awfully frustrating if you don't use vim/emacs. This is due to Go's young age, but you shouldn't be forced into using a certain editor to get syntax highlighting.

The alternative to "go fmt" for Javascript is a good IDE or jslint/jshint.

In Go, you get a lot in the standard library, but you miss out on a lot in the community. Yet another young language problem, you wind up having to roll your own for a lot of things that should just exist. It can be frustrating looking for answers because you might be the first person working on the problem in the language.

Also, just as a general thing I've perceived, people seem to argue static types vs dynamic types more than that a particular language is "better." Go and JS/node are both great!!!! Go is typed, JS is not and you deal with the consequences in both situations. Static typed languages have big faults with external data handling that sometimes cripple features (or makes them far more difficult to accomplish). Dynamic typed languages can fall victim to variables being used incorrectly (especially when not using an IDE). That's the biggest bulk of the difference in my experience.

> Typing in Go can still be annoying for some situations. If you're dealing with external content (creating an API with mutable content that you still need to read) it can be annoying at best (e.g. reminds me of writing C). Types in Go are a nice implementation though.

Indeed, that's probably the biggest flaw I've found working with GO's type system. Trying to work with unknown n-level JSON is real pain.

If your JSON is effectively "strongly typed" (most APIs are), this is going to be a huge win for you.

If your JSON is not, then you'll have a problem in any statically typed language (not just Go), because you need some way to reason about the type. You'll also have the same problem with dynamically typed languages as well - the main difference is that Go will never do implicit casts (I would view this as a good thing).

I've done a lot of work in Go involving JSON (that's originally why I wrote the above tool - to save myself time), and in practice, it's rare that I have to do anything more than decode, check for an error[0], and then move on.

[0] Which is something everyone should do in all languages, not just Go - once you've confirmed that there is no error, you rid yourself of a lot of possible bugs that could pop up later on in harder-to-discover places.