So, Go is five years old. Looking back through version control, my first bit of Go was in May 2012. I’ve been using it as my preferred language for the last year or so. It still feels very pleasant and easy to work with. In no small part that’s due to the excellent tooling. The well written standard library also helps. Go is perhaps the first language where I’ve not had a burning desire to write a URL type because the builtin one is so awful (e.g. Python and Java). Inside Google, it’s been said that if you want to understand a piece of infrastructure, you should look at the Go implementation.
Looking back at that first Go code I wrote (a small tool of about 500 lines), it’s far from embarrassing. Certainly when compared to my efforts in other languages. The code has a few useful types, and methods that act upon them. It’s pretty readable (thanks to gofmt). The one bad thing is that I relied on panic far too heavily, instead of returning errors. The code ran happily for a year or so until the need for it was removed.
Anyway, if you’ve not already done so, try writing your next program in Go. You may be surprised at what a pleasant and productive experience it is.
Jabbering Giraffe 