[gtrubetskoy]

>> With go you can take a C++/python programmer and have them writing production code pretty soon

In my experience, learning Go (and by that I mean fully grasping the ways of Go, goroutines, channels, selects, interfaces, type switches, etc) takes at least a year for someone whose background is C/Python/Ruby. Then may be it's just me.

[lossolo]

I think for everyone this number is different. Depends on your background, years of experience, knowledge about computer science (not how to write in specific language) etc.

I am polyglot (i write in different langauges) and it took me couple of weeks to master Go.

Read "The Go programming language" book, it's really well written and it touches everything you need to know about Go (or most).

[Dobbs]

It totally took a year to really internalize goisms. But a week or so to pickup the basics, and some really deep code reviews and a bit of pair programming from people I respect, including the author of this article, helped me quickly learn most of the low hanging goisms and the a large portion of the standard library.

The time to go from python dev but never touched go to working on a go code base is measured in weeks in my experience.

[spyspy]

It took me a good 3 months of fighting with the language before it started to click for me, and then another 3 months to really start using it properly. It sucks to always read things like "I was able to write production code on the first day!" around here.

[koffiezet]

I think that depends on the mindset of how you see computer languages. I like learning new languages, every time I encounter some new language, I have to try it out and get at least something basic working.

I'm pretty decent at C, C++, Python and Bash scripting, have participated in larger projects in Java, Perl, Pascal/Delphi and Ruby, and have toyed around with Rust, Haskell, Clojure, Angelscript, Crystal, Lua and probably a bunch more that I forget.

Go for me was a breeze, everything just clicked. It helps that it got a lot of it's inspiration from other languages I already knew pretty well. When started toying around with Haskell for example, this wasn't the case, it took me quite a while to get me up & running with the basics, and I still don't think I know basic Haskell. Go on the other hand was easy, and within a week I was diving into the stdlib sourcecode.

[kasey_junk]

I've been programming Go for almost 2 years and I routinely get stuck trying to figure out the "right" way to do something in the language.

For reference, I felt comfortable in Java, Scala, C# and Perl all faster than Go.