TL;DR

The biggest strength of #Go, IMO, was the FAD created by the fact that it is “backed by Google”. That gave Go immediate traction and bootstrapped a decently sized ecosystem. Everybody knows about it, and have a somewhat positive attitude thinking “it’s simple, fast, and easy to learn”.

I enjoy (crude but still) static typing, compiling to native code, and most of all: native-green thread, making Go quite productive for server-side code. I just had to get used to many workarounds for lack of generics, remember about avoid all the Go landmines and ignore poor expressiveness.

My favorite thing about Go, is that it produces static, native binaries. Unlike software written in Python, getting software written in Go to actually run is always painless.

However, overall, Go is a poorly designed language full of painful archaisms. It ignores multiple great ideas from programming languages research and other PL experiences.

“Go’s simplicity is syntactic. The complexity is in semantics and runtime behavior.”

Every time I write code in Go, I get the job done, but I feel deeply disappointed.