I like the idea of a static binary with no dependencies. It would be nice if my static blog generator fit in with my usual unix toolset. So good job.
Just one nitpick on the marketing copy: why does it matter what it's written in? As a user it could be written in assembler for all I care. As long as it works as advertised on the tin and it's what I'm looking for, who cares if it's written in Go?
Anyway, I'm looking forward to checking it out and seeing if it'll fit my use case.
As jpalomaki pointed out, it matters since it's open source. If the user chooses Hugo and wants to modify or extend it down the line, he or she will be writing Go.
And it might also matter to the author for a few more reasons:
First, Go is a language rising in popularity (http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=golang#q=golang&cmpt=...), and seems especially popular on HN lately. Mere mention of Go will drive more traffic to his site. (This could be supported by the fact that he constantly refers to the language as GoLang, which is much more search-engine friendly than the proper name Go).
Second, if he enjoys working with Go, then raising the language's visibility will be good for the language, and good for developers who have invested in the language.
Looking at the GoLang graph : I have to admit that I'm a little surprised to see so much of that interest originating from China (Shenzhen specifically).
That would imply the initiative came from the Go team, and I can't recall ever seeing anything on go-dev or go-nuts suggesting such. That said, there are quite a lot of Asians on the go-nuts board.
What might play part of this is that one of the main contributors to Go is a guy calling himself "minux"; the guy is pretty fucking brilliant. IIRC, minux is French with Chinese roots, and he's one of the owners of the Chinese port. Note that he doesn't actually work for Google, so so far it's all community driven. Similarly, one of the earliest Go-specific IDE's is LitteIDE, written by VisualFC. I suspect it's partially thanks to them that the Chinese community was off to a good start. Well, that and UTF8.
Anyway, it's all speculation at this point; it would be nice if someone involved with the Chinese Go community could clear this up though.
Go's Rising popularity is false assumption. Comparing to popularity of only modern languages; Go barely registers on the graph & you will have to very careful to note Golang is actually present. so practically, Go is still a niche language.
"Go's Rising popularity is false assumption. Comparing to popularity of only modern languages..."
#1. I'm not comparing popularity, but the trend in popularity. Of the three languages you're comparing against, only Go is showing an upward trend, which might be expected since it's so new. This novelty may explain why we're seeing so many Go articles hit the front page lately.
Many of the articles are the same: "We recently switched to Go, and here are our impressions." Nothing earth shattering, but people apparently are curious. Python and Rails aren't as new, and a good portion of the HN audience are probably already quite familiar with them. The threshold required to get clicks on a Rails article will be much higher.
#2. Your metrics are flawed. Notice all the news stories related to "python" and "ruby." None of the articles are actually about the Python or Ruby programming languages (though many are about Berlusconi's underage prostitute). If you look at Scala in isolation, you'll notice almost none of its news stories relate to Scala the language either. They're about La Scala the Italian opera house, or scala the italian word, etc. GoLang only refers to Go the programming language.
Perhaps it makes more sense to view it in the context of other unique programming names, as compared here with Erlang and Node.js (http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=golang#q=erlang%2C%20...). It looks like Go will surpass Erlang soon, but Node.js searches have been growing about 3x as fast as Go.
"practically, Go is still a niche language."
You're right, but that doesn't seem to stop it from generating a lot of traffic on HN. Which is what we're talking about, after all. And here we are, discussing it.
I'm really not sure Go is a plus in this category of application, anyway. With jekyll and it's ilk, part of the allure is that if I need to do something it doesn't support out of the box, I can just embed some code right there along with the site sources, and it'll be executed when building the site.
With Go, the second you step outside the box, you'd have to recompile the site compiler first. I've had so many experiences in the Java world with having to get a whole development environment and build working just to change one little piece of text, that I really think interpreted languages are a plus here.
Don't hold Java against Go :). It is all a matter of perspective I guess. Go requires 2 environmental (GOROOT, GOPATH) variables and you are ready to Go (zing). go run foo plus near instant compile times makes it feel extraordinarily script-y for small stuff.
Hugo adds some external dependencies which can be fetched with `go get` (fsnotify, fsync, pflag, hugolib). One command deps are filled and you still have all the Go goodness.
Jekyll requires (or generally expects) gem and requires at runtime (classifier, colorator, commander, directory_watcher, kramdown, liquid, maruku, pygments, redcarpet, safe_yaml) and for development (activesupport, cucumber, launchy, rake, rdiscount, rdoc, RedCloth, redgreen, rr, shoulda, simplecov, simplecov-gem-adapter)
The language can be important since this is an open source project. Given two open source projects that are otherwise similar, I'm more likely to pick the one that is written in language I'm familiar with.
Just one nitpick on the marketing copy: why does it matter what it's written in? As a user it could be written in assembler for all I care. As long as it works as advertised on the tin and it's what I'm looking for, who cares if it's written in Go?
Anyway, I'm looking forward to checking it out and seeing if it'll fit my use case.