Why Go is my favorite programming language

I've been using Go for a while, and am frankly amazed at the quality of the tooling.

I'll add something others haven't mentioned... the profiler produces an absolutely amazing graph of the run-time call tree[0]. This makes it incredibly easy to not only see where the code is spending its time, I can easily the context, and where else time is being spent. I recently sped some code up (5x!) using this.

0: https://blog.golang.org/profiling-go-programs

Quite common in fashion driven industries.

I know this is repeated often, but only because it apparently still has to: interface{} is very different from void*. It carries type-information with it. That makes it safe.

"for all the deficiencies Go has, it is somehow highly compatible with the way my brain works."

I have been tempted to write a blog post about "Why People Actually Can Write Real Programs In Go." To listen to HN complain about the language you'd think that it must be clearly impossible to ever write a program of any kind without massively copying and pasting everywhere, when in reality I find it's actually quite pleasant for a non-trivial subset of programs.

The short answer is that it has a lot of features that people, generally not being used to them, work better than people may realize from the bullet points and often work together better than people realize. Favoring composition over inheritance is a legitimately good choice. Being able to declare interfaces that other objects I don't control conform to has a lot of little effects that you wouldn't anticipate in advance, to the point that while I understand the bondage&discipline impulse to require code to declare what interfaces it supports, I would consider that a legitimate mistake in most of the languages that do that. (In practice, it turns out the problem of "accidental satisfaction" basically doesn't exist. We learned that from the duck typing languages like Python and how they never really had a problem with that.) And while the grand concurrency stuff may seem neat, the little stuff can be nice too; just yesterday I wrote some code that takes a list of servers to query for some particular thing, and it was easy to write it to do them all simultaneously; that wasn't a Grand Architecture thing, it was just a function that casually did something that is a royal pain in many languages. (There are also languages that can do it better; I actually know many of them. Erlang would be roughly a tie here and Haskell could look really awesome if you put a bit of work into it. Elixir might beat Go, not sure, but I know Erlang itself doesn't.) And there's some other things like that.

The other thing about Go is that I like it for work, but not necessarily for my hobby. The thing about all those restrictions in Go that apply to me is that they symmetrically apply to my coworkers. As much fun as a more powerful language can be, it becomes a lot less fun when you've got dozens of developers trying to work in one code base in those languages; what is power for you is power for them, too, and, well, let's just say they are not always going to be the most expert developers in the world. I've seen... things. And at times, I've even been the one who did the "... things". So even though I know how to use Haskell productively and generally correctly, I'm generally very uninterested in introducing it into the team environment that I have. This is, IMHO, a very important point that I don't hear discussed often enough.

Basically, if you take HN's opinion of "Go is useless and should be wiped from the face of the Earth" as a scientific theory that predicts how useful it would be, the theory is falsified. It is useful and some of us even enjoy it for certain tasks. But I for one would never suggest it is useful for everything and actually frequently warn people off from certain tasks.

Two weeks is a tiny investment to properly evaluate a language. Haskell is tripping you up because you're likely new to proper FP and very strongly typed languages. Pushing past two weeks, even if you don't use it, will make you a better developer, and the next FP or strongly typed language will come more easily.