<i>Go is the most exciting new mainstream language to appear in at least 15 years</i><p>I'm not sure Go even counts as a mainstream language, as I see no evidence of significant penetration in the industry. It has a couple of interesting features (goroutines might be an example), but it's missing other useful features that numerous modern languages provide (generics probably the most obvious example), it has a not-quite-C syntax that seems to be different but without really improving very much, its GC strategy doesn't seem to fit with positioning it as a systems programming language, it has limited facilities for robust error handling... I'm not sure many people would even have noticed it if Google hadn't been behind it.
People keep saying that Go can be used for systems programming, but not backing that up. It has a non-optional garbage collector and it's garbage collector isn't nearly as good as the state of the art. Why do we expect it to be able to handle systems programming tasks?
No. I don't see any benefit of using it over java or JVM languages like clojure/Scala which have huge ecosystem attached to them and now even clojure supports Go like concurrency too.
By Betterige's law of headlines [1], I can safely answer this question by "No".<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines</a>
It's missing some key features (Generics anyone?) that put it somewhere in terms of usability between C and Java, and it has nowhere near the same tooling or performance characteristics as the JVM. So, it has a while to go yet I think but would love to see a serious JVM competitor here.
Go, Java, C#, ... => controlled by a large corp.<p>C/C++, Python, Ruby, D, Haskell, (Rust,) ... => controlled by a community.<p>I think this "large corp" control is not beneficent in the long run.
Go can't compete on performance with C and has a fairly primitive GC. It also isn't nearly as expressive as python or ruby. It seems like Go fans hope that if they repeat it often enough that Go will somehow "own the next decade".
People don't know the skill, experience and the wisdom of the designers. Every freaking detail in Go has been thought out over decades deeper than most people ever can...go ;-). And it is a language of Pike, Thompson, Griesemer & al. not Google. It is more Bell Labs than Google.