The Go Programming Language and Environment

&gt; Although the design of most languages concentrates on innovations in syntax, semantics, or typing, Go is focused on the software development process itself.<p>This important fact is often missed in flame wars. No, Go is not the most expressive, performant, or pure programming language. But it is darn pragmatic and has produced amazing results in just a decade of widespread availability.<p>An example of that pragmatism:<p>&gt; The language provides strings, hash maps, and dynamically sized arrays as built-in, easily used data types. As noted earlier, these are sufficient for most Go programs. The result is greater interoperability between Go programs—for example, there are no competing implementations of strings or hash maps to fragment the package ecosystem.<p>Some language enthusiasts argue that strings shouldn&#x27;t exist in programming languages, because they don&#x27;t actually exist -- after all, they are just byte arrays that can be decoded in a variety of ways. But in the real world, &quot;strings&quot; are everywhere (e.g. this comment), and it is a great benefit to having them easily available to the programmer with little to no ambiguity.

My initial impressions back in 2013 when I started using Go was that it&#x27;s development environment was annoyingly opinionated (the GOPROJECT env var crap, which is now gone). I was mainly using C&#x2F;C++ at the time and for smaller tools python. Go with it&#x27;s static binaries however looked like a very interesting python alternative, so I tried it anyway, and found a language that was very easy to dive into. Took me only a few days to really feel comfortable with it, which surprised me a bit.<p>My main take-aways, other than what is mentioned in the article:<p>* it was a lot easier and even a natural thing to dive into other people&#x27;s and even the stdlib&#x27;s code. I had been coding in C&#x2F;C++ and the only time I did that was when I was tracking bugs. Now I just do it to figure out how things are done or even out of curiosity.<p>* libraries are source-code only. This is great for developers, and is a large reason for the previous point, but some businesses are hesitant towards this. One thing to always keep in mind here however is licensing.<p>* while not actively encouraged, the way you write Go pushes you towards writing reusable libraries, with just a small wrapper frontend. You see this in many larger projects you can easily integrate many in your own application.<p>* the standard library is fantastic, and contains a lot more than many expect, but clearly shows what the target audience is: operations and backend development.<p>* dependency management used to be garbage, this has massively improved. Not perfect, but better.<p>* Cross-compiling is a breeze. Coming from C&#x2F;C++, this blew me away. Even when using CGo, which complicates things a bit, there is pretty good tooling around this.<p>* It&#x27;s very opinionated, but most of the times, in my opinion, right.<p>It ended up replacing pretty much all my need for C&#x2F;C++ code, except for embedded Arduino-like hobby stuff, and I haven&#x27;t looked back. The main valid thing I&#x27;ve seen people complain about is the lack of a decent multi-platform GUI library, which I don&#x27;t need, and is always a mess anyway. Web-frontends are a thing though, and goes hand in hand with Go being pretty damn good at backends and APIs.

&gt; Go is efficient, easy to learn, and freely available, but we believe that what made it successful was the approach it took toward writing programs, particularly with multiple programmers working on a shared codebase.<p>A discussion on the factors that make Go successful that doesn’t include the fact that it’s designed, dogfooded, and marketed by one of the largest software developers in the world is… incomplete to put it lightly.<p>I mean just the name of the language proves this point. Golang was a decade old PL project when Google Go was released. But Google, enamored with the name, steamrolled over that project and claimed no one would be confused. Clearly, because overnight Go came to mean Google Go to 99% of developers, and Golang might as well have never existed.<p>This shows Google Go from the very beginning has relied on the clout of Google for growth and adoption. We can talk about the merits of the language, sure, but to hear the authors of Go attribute its success to its focus on the practice of software development and leave out the 5000 lb software gorilla just adds insult to injury.