
Why it's worth learning Go - n1bble
https://medium.com/@rjzaworski/why-its-worth-learning-go-1df48d9dcc48
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village-idiot
Go was designed for a very narrow set of constraints that match what goes on
in Google. From my perspective it’s one of the very few general purpose
languages (along with erlang) that were designed to specifically match one
company’s needs, rather than grown semi-organically.

If your needs align with that somewhat, you might want to use Go. If your
needs are different, you should stay the hell away from it.

~~~
zinid
> From my perspective it’s one of the very few general purpose languages
> (along with erlang)

Maybe I'm missing something, but since when Erlang is a general purpose
language? Erlang was designed for a quite narrow niche and feels very well
there, but Go... well, honestly, I don't understand what Go was designed for.

~~~
pacala
Go was designed for data munging via gRPC.

~~~
village-idiot
One of the clear design needs for go was “you have a crap ton of code you need
to write, and you need to _aggressively_ parallelize the work over a bunch of
mixed skill devs, without the worst ones fucking it up, and without the best
going off the reservation and making something that can’t be understood
later.”

Personally that sounds like my own hell, but that’s the world Google lives in.

~~~
erik_seaberg
Despite Pike's appalling contempt in
[https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article](https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article)
I'm not convinced this is a problem Google actually has. They're faced with
perverse incentives but they're far from stupid.

~~~
village-idiot
Pike’s attitude has been a large factor in me not bothering with Go.

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RickJWagner
Go is a heavy player in the Kubernetes space.

For those in the 'Enterprise computing' business, learning a little Go won't
be harmful.

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pankajdoharey
There are many reasons to learn Go but even the author didn't emphasise on
performance because it is not. There are many dynamic compilers which produce
faster binaries than go. I think the best reasoning in the blog was A-Grade
standard lib. That is something not all available new languages enjoy. But Go
from the early days had good standard lib support. Go comes with batteries but
then so does Chicken scheme.

~~~
andresp
From generics to sets and several others, I think there are enough reasons to
consider that go does not "come with batteries", especially when you compare
it with almost any other modern (>90s) language.

