Not really defending the vague statements of the person you're replying to, but I'd take those surveys with a giant grain of salt. There's just too much selection bias at work. I for one struggle to imagine how any company could ever induce me to take one of these surveys, and I doubt I'm that special a snowflake. 49% of devs have used python in the last 12 months? And 50% java? Huh? Who are these people?

Probably the best we can do is analyses such as github's [1], which doesn't rely on people responding to marketing emails to reach a conclusion - but I'd say even that is very far from the big picture. Most large IT organisations still run their version control, for example. Hell, I'm still coming across PHP and JS programmers in 2019 that don't use any source control. Professionals. At agencies. Yeah.

None of this is to rain on golang's parade - it's a solid language IMO, despite the hype around it encouraging many people to, again IMO, optimize prematurely. Just to remind that an output is only as good as its inputs.

[1] https://github.blog/2018-11-15-state-of-the-octoverse-top-pr...

Fully agree, but I find surveys better than intuition.

On that matter you'll find plenty of Rust advocates referring to SO's survey stating it's the most loved language. They will however try to downplay surveys which report that Go's adoption is far superior and distancing.

With that said I find comparing Go and Rust an exercise in futility since the usecases rarely intersect.

The only way to know that you have previously had 'good intuitions' about the future would be if you recorded them (memory doesn't cut it) and then compared them with a subsequent events. Then you'd have to find a way of demonstrating that past intuitive success is an indicator of future intuitive success. Unless you've done all this, you only have an intuition that your intuition for future trends is good.

It's intuition all the way down.