Will Go be the new go-to programming language?

http://gigaom.com/cloud/will-go-be-the-new-go-to-programming-language/

by mtgx • 14 years ago

137 183 14 years ago

gigaom.com

TylerE2• 14 years ago

It's close. The tooling is really user-friendly, which is a big win.

Add some sort of decent generics and you're really close.

A top-class GUI toolkit would be good too.

kitsune_• 14 years ago

I feel like not including generics is a huge oversight. Also, the way many go aficionados discuss this over at golang-nuts put me off a great deal.

sanderjd• 14 years ago

What is an example of a use case for generics that can't be done, or is significantly less convenient to do, with interfaces? It sounds like there is at least some thought that generics may be included at some point, but I really haven't missed them thus far.

nephesh5• 14 years ago

Yeah, it basically makes the answer to the original question an emphatic "No".

andrewcooke2• 14 years ago

to some extent, i think that the demand for generics is based on familiarity.

for example, long ago, i was looking at the source for some of the go libraries and couldn't understand why they had cut+paste code. when i asked on stackoverflow the unaminous answer was "because go doesn't support generics". you can see the discussion here - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6645329/why-does-the-go-i...

BUT if you read that thread, and the discussion under the first answer, you'll see that there is an apparently reasonable solution without generics. that seemed like an obvious approach to me (coming, i guess, more from python and fp), but one that wasn't obvious to anyone answering (coming, i guess, more from java and c).

i have no evidence that this is a general problem, but it surprised me at the time. ever since i have been suspicious of people complaining about the lack of generics (disclaimer: i don't use go myself - when i looked at it i thought that it was clear improvement on c/c++/java, but could have been even better if they had been more open to ideas from fp - http://acooke.org/cute/GoRocksHow0.html ; in other words, i'd be happy to use it at work instead of c (current project), but if i can choose myself i'm more likely to go with a more functional approach).

azth• 14 years ago

Have you checked out Rust (http://rust-lang.org)? They seem to be closer to what Go's original goals were, with generics, proper RAII, etc.

Evbn3• 14 years ago

It's not an oversight, it is a tradeoff. Check Russ Cox'sswtch.com website for details. You can write generic functions with reflection.

nuttendorfer2• 14 years ago

I'm waiting for a mature GUI library to start something serious in Go.

agumonkey2• 14 years ago

I'd be very^2 interested to see how the concurrency primitives of Go help graphical applications.

mseepgood8• 14 years ago

The creators of Go have cluster a.k.a. cloud computing in mind: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTl0tl9BGdc And the predictions in this article are about PaaS / IaaS / orchestration, which have not a lot to do with GUI.

Implementing a top-class GUI toolkit that is not just a binding to an existing one would be at least half a decade of work. And when it's done all GUIs will be rendered by web views anyway. The web is the presentation layer of the future. Classic desktop widget sets like QtGui or Swing will fit nowhere, because all the consumer operating systems like iOS, OS X, Android and Windows 8+ will have highly custom user interface paradigms, which won't be mappable to each other by some cross-platform thing.

drbawb2• 14 years ago

>just a web view anyways

This. Go makes it fantastically simple to go from 0-to-web-server.

There were a few projects I wanted to write in Go, but avoided because of needing a GUI.

Then I remembered: I can just bolt a web-page onto my app, and I get a GUI for free [assuming knowledge of HTML/CSS/JS].

Even better: that GUI will work on any computer with a modern web-browser, including my phones. If you stick to standards, it should even be a reasonably consistent UX across the newer browsers.

---

While I would still _like_ to see a good UI toolkit for Go, I really think it's less of a necessity than most would have you believe.

nuttendorfer2• 14 years ago

I think developers will stay on traditional desktop systems, most likely a Linux since Apple and Microsoft target consumers(consuming videos, browsing the web or using only specific applications like Excel).

Developers need tools too so we shouldn't just abandon non-web technologies.

pyre2• 14 years ago

I've been out of the OSX-space for a while. Are there a lot of apps using web views for their GUI? The only ones I can think of are Colloquy and Adium. Even then, they don't do the whole GUI as a web view, just the parts of the display that are theme-able.

chrisguitarguy• 14 years ago

There are a few GUI toolkits in the works, it seems.

http://go-lang.cat-v.org/library-bindings

Check out the "GUIs and Widget Toolkits" section.

rjzzleep• 14 years ago

top class GUI toolkit? come back in a few years

jph• 14 years ago

Yes. :) I'm using it now, and it feels better to me than Java and C/C++. The language is cleaner and the toolchain is very smooth.

The new Go Revel framework (by HN user robfig) looks especially promising for web MVC apps: http://robfig.github.com/revel/

Yuioup• 14 years ago

Yes. Combined with Dart and Google has their strategy for leaving Java and Firefox in the dust.

viseztrance• 14 years ago

I doubt dart will ever gain the momentum that go currently has.

sigzero3• 14 years ago

go has momentum? I am not sure I would go that far.

agilord2• 14 years ago

it is really early to bury a tool that has just started to take some shape. why do you have doubts?

EwanToo5• 14 years ago

It's certainly the new go-to programming language for blog posts about programming languages :)

It's a very nice language, I like it a lot, but if there's one thing we all should have learnt over the last few years, it's that no programming language is the right choice for every task.

tsahyt• 14 years ago

I think Go has big potential, especially with those who now code C++ or Java but also with some users of dynamic typing languages. I have a feeling Go is here to stay for a while.

Kilimanjaro• 14 years ago

"C will always have its place but Ruby and Python code bases will go to Go."

Not in the web world. Go will take programmers from the C/Java camp, but not many from the ruby/python camp.

Not even one in a hundred startups will use Go as their main programming language. Ask PG to confirm.

I am an early golang user and once in a while play with it to try new stuff, but still coding everything else in python.

To answer the question: Yes for systems work, No for web work.

stevvooe• 14 years ago

"I was asked a few weeks ago, "What was the biggest surprise you encountered rolling out Go?" I knew the answer instantly: Although we expected C++ programmers to see Go as an alternative, instead most Go programmers come from languages like Python and Ruby. Very few come from C++." - Rob Pike (http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponentia...)

EwanToo5• 14 years ago

Strangely, I think almost the opposite - I think it'll take a lot of "scripting language" tasks, but not much of the system programmers jobs.

Coming from a scripting language background, Go feels like a step forward in performance, without many of the headaches of C++ or Java.

But speaking to people who write C++ for a living, they see little or no use for go for them, as they need either the performance or flexibility of a lower level language like C++ - that's why they haven't moved to an alternative a long time ago.

guilloche• 14 years ago

Cannot agree more, and I will give go a try to replace python for performance.

Jabbles6• 14 years ago

I disagree. IMO:

I think Go will be well suited for web applications: 1. Google App Engine will continue to play a major role in Go's development. 2. The speed of development in Go is equal to or exceeds that of other dynamic languages. Static typing takes minimal extra time and immediately pays off by catching silly errors, then continues to ease development (and documentation) in the future. 3. Go's standard library already contains powerful tools to develop web apps.

It's important to remember that Go is still very young. Could you explain why you still prefer Python over Go?

pjmlp4• 14 years ago

The language offers much more powerful programming abstractions.

If you need speed, you can either go PyPy, or Cython after locating the problematic code spots.

papsosouid5• 14 years ago

Go offers nothing for C programmers, and Java/C++ programmers are largely using languages by corporate decree, not choice. Go's main audience is in fact people who are still clinging to dynamically typed languages. Where modern languages like haskell or scala are too scary for them, go is familiar enough to draw them in, and show them that static typing doesn't mean java.

slurgfest5• 14 years ago

'clinging to dynamically typed languages' and 'too scary' implies that the only people using such languages are incompetent beginners. That is posturing more than it is an honest description of reality. Same applies to your description of Go as nothing more than a bridge to Scala.

Are you so sure that everyone using languages other than Scala and Haskell is that much dumber than you are?

It took a while for C++ and then for Java to become languages of corporate decree. If Go will ever become one of those languages, it will take around the same amount of time.

4ad• 14 years ago

As someone who only used C for systems work for 15 years, and for the last two years switched exclusively to Go (except in the kernel) I disagree. Go offers everything I want as a C programmer.

michaelhoffman2• 14 years ago

> Betteridge's Law of Headlines is an adage that states, "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_Law_of_Headlines

sp332• 14 years ago

There is no answer in this article, but the evidence given says "maybe".

jpdoctor• 14 years ago

Is Betteridge's Law of Headlines Correct?

tptacek4• 14 years ago

Much better that we all recite this message board trope than talk about golang. After all, there might be 1 or 2 people left in the world who haven't already heard it.

michaelhoffman2• 14 years ago

And there might be 1 or 2 people left on Hacker News who haven't already heard of Go.

polshaw• 14 years ago

Is there a law about people always quoting a law from wikipedia?.. Betteridge, Poe, Godwin, Dunning-Kruger.. it is getting just as old as the terrible blog post titles that provoke them them.

This is not really even such a ridiculous proposition, either- certainly worthy of discussion.

trebor• 14 years ago

Not that I've heard. But there should be...

mcantelon• 14 years ago

Cantelon's Law: if you put someone's name in front of an adage people will feel savvy when they quote it.

Symmetry• 14 years ago

I've found that law rather accurate for news headlines, but rather less so for blog posts or scientific papers.

jasonkostempski• 14 years ago

Law applied to some recent HN headlines:

How Much Is a Fun Job Worth? No.

Ask HN: Why is wikidot.com blacklisted? No.

Ask HN: What is your ideal income? No.

Which educational technologies are worth betting on? No.

Ask PG: What Is The Most Frighteningly Ambitious Idea You Have Been Pitched On? No.

icelancer• 14 years ago

Those answers are pretty close.

kingmanaz2• 14 years ago

>How Much Is a Fun Job Worth? No.

That recalls an old prolog joke:

Q: "How many prolog programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?"

A: "Yes."

erichocean4• 14 years ago

I'd like to see Cassandra implemented in Go (currently its Java/JVM-based).

kingkilr• 14 years ago

Why?

erichocean4• 14 years ago

Mainly to see if it would have better GC ability than Cassandra.

I love Cassandra, and the JVM is solid too, but the "stop-the-world-pause" in it's current garbage collectors truly blows. All of that fast latency is for not if the JVM decides to spend a few seconds churning through garbage. :(

I've looked into Azul's Zing JVM, but it's basically only for beefy hardware (16+ cores and 32GB+ RAM), and it's also crazy expensive.

freehunter3• 14 years ago

I would imagine his reasoning would be that Go handle concurrency and threading very efficiently and with a low memory footprint, while Java tends to use more memory.

markmm5• 14 years ago

It's all about the libraries, Python and C for example have libraries/bindings for most things, e.g. Postgresql, ZMQ, Json etc. Google could invent the best programming language ever but without _mature_ _robust_ libraries it is pretty much useless.

tptacek4• 14 years ago

Go has a pretty decent standard library.

http://golang.org/pkg/

markmm5• 14 years ago

Yes it looks good, but what about mature 3rd party libraries?

emu3• 14 years ago

Unfortunately, it seems to be lacking many useful data structures. This bites you hard once you hit the limitations of the built-ins.

freehunter3• 14 years ago

Go does have quite a few bindings that exist already for many commonly-used libraries (and some not-so-commonly-used). I'm pretty glad there are Lua bindings, for example. When Go makes more sense than C but Lua makes more sense than Go, I was kind of stuck until I discovered this.

Here is a listing I know of, this probably isn't comprehensive:

http://go-lang.cat-v.org/library-bindings

markmm5• 14 years ago

Nice, im worried that due to Go's young age the libraries might be a bit flaky or lacking, I could be wrong though.

luriel4• 14 years ago

That is a list of wrappers for C libraries, there are even more pure-Go libraries:

http://go-lang.cat-v.org/pure-go-libs

And I maintain both pages, and I have to confess they are badly outdated because is hard to keep up with all the libraries that are being written.

tav• 14 years ago

This is one of the main reasons that I use Go. Its libraries are of significantly higher quality than most other languages. And since most libraries are native, it's much easier to expand on their capabilities without having to resort to forking some C extension like with Python.

genwin4• 14 years ago

It's a chicken/egg thing. People will use Go for projects that its existing libraries can handle. That will be more people as the libraries expand. Given the extent of today's libraries I'd say that Go is useful for plenty of projects.

elteto• 14 years ago

This can be said about pretty much any language in their infancy, it is not a setback, just a matter of time and getting attention from the community (and Go is getting a lot).

kodablah2• 14 years ago

Can anyone confirm that 32-bit problems still exist concerning memory leaks and cgo? If so, this would confirm that it isn't a cross-platform "go-to programming language".

Jabbles6• 14 years ago

Yes.

The speed of development is far better than any other language I've experienced. I use it as a replacement for C++ and Bash, a statement I don't think you could make about any other language. Apart from the lowest-level kernel work and the highest-performance code, I think Go will become the NBL. Even on the subject of performance, Go is improving quickly, and if you're using it as a replacement for, say Python, your performance will be substantially improved anyway.

Its simplicity is astonishing. Very few things will surprise you whilst coding, although a few topics take a while to learn. I know many hackers try to work in accordance with the phrase "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.". I cannot think of anything Go has that it doesn't need. Not even goto :P

http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/26979.html http://golang.org/ref/spec#Goto_statements

markmm5• 14 years ago

It might be nice for a quick script or standalone program, but most decent size software projects need plenty of mature libraries to be of much use. Python and C have decades head start here.

tocomment• 14 years ago

Can Go make use of C or Python libraries? Or is that a crazy question?

(Part of Python's popularity is that it is such a great glue language)

Jabbles6• 14 years ago

Well, I don't expect most programs to be re-written in Go, but I think in, say 10 years' time most new programs will be. By then Go's mature, fast libraries will be comparable to any of Python's (although C will have the kernel-level advantages still I think).

I think 24 months quoted in the article is optimistic...

gaius• 14 years ago

Python, your performance will be substantially improved anyway

Except not really - if you are doing computation in Python you are probably using NumPy which in turn is using hand-tuned assembly language BLAS or whatever under the hood. And if not, you are probably I/O bound.

j2labs4• 14 years ago

That's a small use case compared to the whole language. The statement you disagree with is more true than your anecdote about one library. On top of that, all the network I/O is automatically nonblocking.

slurgfest5• 14 years ago

'Performance' is not a bullet point. Please do not wave hands about 'performance' without thinking about the actual benefit in the actual domain you are programming in.

If you need to write fine-grained embedded, DSP or graphics code you are probably going to use a true low level language like C or C++ anyway, not a gc language.

If you are not working in a domain like that, you need to measure to even know whether the language is even a significant bottleneck. By the time you have measured you can often find a targeted place to optimize with FFI or extension modules.

If you are using a language just because you think it is faster at everything, you are optimizing prematurely and in a somewhat naive way.

genwin4• 14 years ago

> If you are not working in a domain like that, you need to measure to even know whether the language is even a significant bottleneck.

Or, if one is confident that the project can be done in Go, and that existing performance measurements of alternatives are accurate and show much worse performance, and the alternatives aren't much easier to use anyway, use Go and don't look back. Why optimize with FFI or extension modules when one can scrap that idea at little expense?

As an analogy if I wanted a faster car I'd probably be better off switching cars than tweaking my existing car's engine.

lobster_johnson• 14 years ago

Performance is a huge bullet point for me. A language such as Python or Ruby requires you to make considerations (writing performance-sensitive code by shelling out to a native C extension, for example) that don't crop up in a natively compiled language such as Go.

In fact, for performance-sensitive things the difference is often staggering, even for things that scripting languages were originally invented for, such as text processing. Performance-sensitive doesn't always mean "DSP or graphics code". If you want to process huge log files in Ruby, for example, you can start as many threads you like to attempt to parallelize it without getting anywhere because of the global interpreter lock, and will find yourself resorting to things like forking off child processes. Ruby would be a bad fit because it does not perform well. I often end up writing such processing code in Lua (using LuaJIT) because of the dramatic difference in performance.

One must always consider the domain, but performance is one important facet of Go: Go gives you high performance without sacrificing much of the expressiveness of dynamic languages such as Python and Ruby. (Conversely, C/C++ gives you high performance without the same expressiveness.) If Go had the same VM as Ruby I would probably never consider using it for anything, as I don't see any language-level benefits that outweigh the performance aspect.

ajross2• 14 years ago

> The speed of development is far better than any other language I've experienced.

No, it isn't. Here's the proof: someone has said exactly that about, and I'm really not kidding, every newly popular language over the last 20 years. They said it about Java. About Python. About Ruby, and CoffeeScript and Clojure and Haskell and...

Yet the Great Leap Forward in programming productivity hasn't arrived. And Go won't bring it either.

Go no doubt improves your speed of coding. And being a new and different toolbox it's more fun, so it makes your coding more engaging. You "feel" more productive. But your hard bugs are still hard. And your maintenance hassles are still hassles. And your bad designs are still bad. That stuff is what takes time, not banging out your code.

Programming languages can make the easy stuff easy. They can't fix our own stupidity.

(To be clear: I'm not saying Go is bad, it actually looks like a ton of fun to me, though I haven't had the chance to really kick the tires yet. But don't attribute to it properties it doesn't have.)

redbad• 14 years ago

    > someone has said exactly that about, and I'm really not 
    > kidding, every newly popular language over the last 20 
    > years.

That's probably true, and I grok your point, but pretty much everyone who's using Go in a production environment cites speed of development among the major, top-N reasons they're using the language. Past a certain threshold, there's something there that can't be hand-waved away.

    > Programming languages can make the easy stuff easy. 
    > They can't fix our own stupidity.

One of the neat things about Go, in my opinion, is that it converts a lot of "hard stuff" to "easy stuff", especially in the domain of concurrency, simply by the nature of its idioms.

sbochins• 14 years ago

What is substantially different from GO besides performance. It just always seemed like another boring OO language that is fast. I've not really been impressed with the programming languages created at google. None of them seem to be very innovative or solve anything new. I guess it stems from google's affection towards java and misusing python (not using any of it's more powerful features, so it the code basically looks like a prettier version of java).

sigzero3• 14 years ago

I don't see it happening in the near future but it might.

new299• 14 years ago

This is a terrible article, with no substance. I'm baffled as to why anyone would up vote it, other than "because it's about Go and I like Go".

jongraehl• 14 years ago

Many people don't really read the articles, I'd guess. This article really is devoid of insight.

soapdog• 14 years ago

For those wanting to learn more Go I recommend this online book: http://www.golang-book.com/

conradfr• 14 years ago

Is Google behind all this hype ? There isn't a day without a Go article somewhere.

mhd• 14 years ago

For small ad-hoc multi-processing servers that web shops are writing. Maybe, that seems like a good use case. Not as exotic as Erlang, and not a very demanding environment.

No big chance for enterprise or academia. And I believe that for ordinary "check this, forward that" backend programming, Ruby, Python and Perl will still remain staples, with a few percentage points shifting back and forth, as usual. Rails didn't end Python.

On the other hand, I wouldn't shed a tear if it would eat up the majority of node.js' marketshare.

eckyptang8• 14 years ago

Enterprise here. We're knocking huge monolithic applications sitting on CLR and JVM processes into greater numbers of smaller stand-alone components (SOA style). Go fits here very well indeed.

Our authentication, filestore, directory services, messaging and web front end are all easy targets.

ekm2• 14 years ago

As an absolute amateur in programming i was surprised that i could master Go syntax(in the sense of not having to check back in the notes) in under 2 hours of practice.

taw9• 14 years ago

Go is awesome, but why must we limit ourselves to one language?!

My dev plan used to be Python for rapid prototyping and C for speed optimization. With the advent of Go, I find I'm moving the infrastructure-level Python work into Go and replacing many of the C-oriented middleware tasks with it as well. I'm sure this will evolve as the libraries grow, but I don't see Python & C going away. Nor do I think this is the vision at Google. I suppose this is what is meant by "systems language".

I think Go could end up being the under 35-generation's version of Lisp (in terms of love affair with language structure, etc.).

kingmanaz2• 14 years ago

Things Go got right;

1. Go doesn't discard the last 40+ years of programming history. Ints, chars, arrays, pointers, structs -- in addition to minimalist types that build on these -- are at the heart of Go's lexicon.

2. Following off of point 1: C and C++ source code and algorithms are easily translatable into Go because they look like Go.

3. Following off of point 2: Because old C/C++ code looks similar to Go, Go's libraries will soon number C/C++.

4. A well thought-out, minimalist toolchain. Working with "go install", vim, and gocode is like dancing in the clouds when compared with the morass that is Eclipse or Visual Studio, let alone C/C++ and its makefiles.

5. Go's object-orientation is done right. Go strongly emphasizes "has-a" relations and eschews the "is-a" relations that are prevalent in C# and Java. To see the effect this has on code readability, look at Go's documentation. For example, http://golang.org/pkg/database/sql/ ...scanning one page tells one all that's needs to be known about a package. Go's objects ride just above atomic data structures. There is not a five-mile chain of object dependencies and corresponding taxonomy clouding one's understanding as in C# or Java.

6. Go's channels give the programmer their very own ksh/bash built right in to the language. Admittedly, this is an oversimplification, but piping program units together is a proven method of strongly modularizing applications and has the added benefit of being inherently concurrent. Languages have been moving away from the shell for decades and have in the process lost its advantages.

(With all that said in point 6, there is still room for something like a lightweight, cross-platform, glue-language similar to bash/ksh that -- like Go -- does not throw out 40+ years of shell history. Unsung Tcl/Tk (http://www.softpanorama.org/Scripting/tcl.shtml) and Expect seems to fit the bill the closest currently, though it does not read like the C family of languages. Perhaps if someone were to build a Go shell, or create a cshell that used used Go's conventions, Go would have a good glue-language counterpart.)

pjmlp4• 14 years ago

> Go doesn't discard the last 40+ years of programming history

Except for:

- enumerations

- exceptions

- generics

- dynamic modules

- ...

masklinn4• 14 years ago

Well he said it didn't discard the last 40+ years of programming history, he didn't say anything about the last 30 of those.

aaronblohowiak3• 14 years ago

  - iota
  - http://golang.org/doc/go_faq.html#exceptions
  - http://golang.org/doc/go_faq.html#generics

zackmorris• 14 years ago

I can't use Go until they fix the whitespace bug:

http://zackarymorris.tumblr.com/post/26701252898/a-mistake-i...

But other than that, it looks like a very tasteful language and I want to use it for some parallel computation experiments since they make it so easy to spin off tasks.

thebigshane5• 14 years ago

Wow... I don't understand diving into a language like this without reading about or looking at other source code already written in the language. This is not a bug! Golang enforces certain formatting, it is very opinionated and the authors are very upfront about that. http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#formatting

Also, you can use the `gofmt` tool (when running Go on your local machine) to help you learn what Go prefers if you don't want to read all of the excellent documentation on the site. [EDIT: I see you already know about this tool but I'll leave this comment here for others]

loboman• 14 years ago

Exactly, this is not a bug and this won't be fixed. Go adds a ";" at the end of lines like "func main()", which in this case means "func main(){" has a different meaning than "func main()".

callahad• 14 years ago

Rules about whitespace seem like an awfully superficial reason to dismiss an entire language. Do the other benefits not outweigh that?

thebigshane5• 14 years ago

summary: Click-bait title, content-free article, great language, excellent conversation in (HN) comments.

thebigshane5• 14 years ago

Oh, and here's a pretty good comment on the article regarding static vs dynamic typing:

  eamonnerbonne Thursday, September 13 2012

  It’s a night and day difference. Let me try a writing 
  analogy with Word + Notepad.

  Say you’re trying to write a text for a particularly 
  picky client that will reject your text if you make any 
  mistake or use any unclear phrase. Then dynamic typing is 
  like Notepad: you better be careful, have lots of 
  proofreaders, and expect to have your text rejected 
  often. And when you print it, it’s in a slow-to-read 
  monospaced font.

  Static typing is like Word with all the grammar checking 
  turned up to 11 (it won’t let you print or email any text 
  with what it thinks is an error). It’s harder to learn, 
  and sometimes your PC runs slowly, and the grammar 
  checker will find lots of irrelevant stuff, and to keep 
  it happy you might need to change your style, but it 
  *will* make certain types of error irrelevant (e.g. 
  spelling), and occasionally catch more complicated 
  mistakes too. Also, as a bonus that might or might not be 
  relevant, word prints in a font you can read much more 
  quickly.

  The point being: they’re totally different ways of doing 
  things.

[http://gigaom.com/cloud/will-go-be-the-new-go-to-programming...]

realrocker• 14 years ago

The following features make Go as the "go-to" language for me:

1.Coroutines, Channels and Select: Concurrency with built in synchronization and communication is accessible(especially if your are new to concurrent programming) enough to handle "most" of the grunt work. 2.gofmt: Formats your code for you. No more debates(procrastination) on that. 3.godoc: Generates documents. No more looking for the best 3rd party tool and wasting time. 4. Defer and Close: Helps you to do better post-operation tasks i.e better resource management. 5. Error Handling: Multivalue returns. 6. Type Hierarchy: No type hierarchy exists in the conventional sense. 7. Slices & Maps: Just two of them, and that's why I love it. 8. Brevity and Readability: Clutter free syntax. WYSISWYG language. 9. Philosophy of Exclusiveness: This is most important non-feature which makes Go different and exciting. Go's vision is to be an exclusive programming paradigm rather than being an inclusive one. In this Google I/O video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sln-gJaURzk, Robert Griesemer speaks about an incident that how in a "D" programming conference, the developers intended to include a new programming paradigm in the future. This is what sold it for me as I care more about how the language will grow instead of what new cool features will come in.

Performance is a contentious issue. In an ideal world, performance would just depend on the platform and the language, but in reality it also depends on the skill and idiosyncrasies of the programmer. For me, that is a non-issue.

Quick Reference to Go talks: http://code.google.com/p/go-wiki/wiki/GoTalks

TOGoS• 14 years ago

No. Not for me, anyway.

Go seems okay. I tried to write a few small programs in it but spent a lot of time hunting around in the manual for how to do things. D (as in dlang.org) has a very similar feature set (static but not annoying typing, lightweight threads, value types, GC, native high-level arrays, yaddah yaddah) but is more familiar to us C/Java programmers. One feeling I get is that Go exposes a lot of quirks (e.g. the 'make' function and inter-thread messaging) in the syntax of the language, whereas D takes care of those cases with regular library functions. I was impressed that while writing my first D program I rarely committed any syntax errors, as I found it an intuitive extension of Java/C syntax. So if anything is to by my next go-to language, it's more likely to be D than Go. Or does that make it a d-to language? Ha ha ha heh hrm cough.

jrb1• 14 years ago

Why would you write critical software on a language developed by one company that has a habit of dropping projects once they get bored with them?

As the consternation of C# developers about windows 8, and java developers about Oracle lawsuits, relying on a language that a single company makes is foolish - especially companies that have a track record of abandoning projects.

I think C++11 will be the new go to language. It is standardized. As Moore's law runs out for single cores, C++ is positioned as the language that can run fast on a single process and scale easily to multicore

Evbn3• 14 years ago

No, it is less expressive than Ruby and JS and so will not be as popular with the masses who optimize for LoC.

wamatt• 14 years ago

“How big a deal is this static typing thing??” - Barb Darrow (author of the article)

wow

Will Go be the new go-to programming language?

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