Note

After writing this article people commented about Go being a terrible language. That's fine, I'm just learning Go for fun. But I wrote this other article about the popularity of Go. Check it out and comment.

Original Article

I started reading this book, The Go Programming Language, The (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series) 1st Edition (Donovan & Kernighan), on a whim, just to see what Go was all about and now I'm discovering how nice the language is.

Interestingly, this book will remind you of the old book K&R C (and Brian Kernighan is one of the authors).

Here are a couple of interesting things that Go does:
1) makes it very easy to build to a native Exe --
a) on Linux you can just do
Hide Copy Code

$ go build hello.go

That will build the native exe named hello and it even handles making the file executable (no need to run chmod 777)
b) There's not a huge toolchain to learn. Just use the Go command. it's kind of nice.
2) Go is "smaller" and so it feels like the days of past when you could actually wrap your head around a language instead of feeling like you could never learn it all.
3) It makes retrieving data over HTTP much easier than other languages -- more like just opening a file.
4) It cleans up concurrency issues / makes them easier to handle

Learning A Language That Keeps You Focused

It feels like learning a language that keeps you focused. Sometimes stuff is so huge now that you are going in a million directions with various tech like CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Angular, TypeScript.

Go & Rust Seems Similar

Now, I'm just interested in why I might choose Go over something like Rust (or vice-versa).

Have You Tried Go?

Have you tried out Go? What have your experiences with it been?