Why Go is doomed to succeed

Compiled to native binary, garbage collected, no JVM and not object oriented is why I like it.

Isn't the issue that people who generally like Go read and write articles like this? ;-) The same is said by PHP devs:)

> TL;DR Golang was explicitly engineered to thrive in projects built by large groups of programmers with different skill levels, and there is no larger such group than the open source community.

Very true.

This article hits the nail on the head. Most people say that they cannot "express" certain things in go, or have to jump through hoops to do it. The point of go is not to create a highly expressive language, but rather to create one that has a high enough abstraction to be productive but simple enough so that people coming from different backgrounds can acquaint themselves with it quickly.

In other words, it is a language for teams.

I would word it slightly differently--in Go you are free to express yourself in exactly one way: the idiomatic Go way. Anything else will be painful (a good clue is if you find yourself using reflection frequently).

Go is doomed to succeed because it extends the mental model of C with a concurrency model that finds a decent compromise between power and ease of use, makes the typing less prone to subversion, adds memory safety via GC, uses a structural subtyping system through interfaces that brings many OO-like benefits while still keeping to the C struct way of thinking, first-class functions, various syntactic rough edges cleaned up and so forth.

Because the Unix system programming world (and POSIX particularly) is very much built with the conventions and semantics of C in mind, most serious POSIX programming outside of C means you have to deal with painful FFIs, lousy wrappers, overly abstracted APIs that hide details like certain lower level flags and so forth. Some are better at this than others, of course (OCaml is one of the better ones)... but, nonetheless.

So it's unsurprising that many infrastructure developers are jumping to Go. There's just enough new things to incentivize a switch, but not too much that it dissuades from it.