"In the past week I’ve rewritten a relatively large distributed system in Go"
Maybe I don't have any programming talent at all, but I cannot even imagine to rewrite a 'large distributed system' in a week. The not-too-large distributed systems I worked with had years of thinking behind them, I could not even type in the characters of the code in a week.
What am I supposed to take away from these links, other than the technical culture's self-defeating tendency to lionize individuals to fit a hero narrative?
If you read the second link, it's presented that that guy is actually a group of people working under a phony name, to give the cult a "hero". Drum up hype, etc.
Nicolas Bourbaki is the collective pseudonym under which a group of (mainly French) 20th-century mathematicians wrote a series of books presenting an exposition of modern advanced mathematics, beginning in 1935. With the goal of founding all of mathematics on set theory, the group strove for rigour and generality. Their work led to the discovery of several concepts and terminologies still discussed.
It is a rather vauge statement and could have used some clarification; however Go does make writing network protocols very simple, and building something like a gossip protocol based system with a leader election system is doable in a week. Even quicker if you use some of the existing distributed systems libraries for Go.
All of the HTTP, socket, encryption, compression etc libraries have a really clean, consistent design based around stackable reader and writer interfaces. This makes it really easy to combine things, swap out transport layers etc.
Go routines and channels are also nice for handling concurrent requests though I find myself using mutexes more than channels for finer grained control.
Go makes it straightforward to have one program efficiently communicating with many different servers and clients. It does this by having all network IO be event-based in such a way that it's effectively tied directly into the scheduler, and then communicating between the different goroutines managing all these connections is very easy.
Maybe I don't have any programming talent at all, but I cannot even imagine to rewrite a 'large distributed system' in a week. The not-too-large distributed systems I worked with had years of thinking behind them, I could not even type in the characters of the code in a week.