[cixin]

Go moving from 54th to 13th most popular is pretty astonishing.

I'm personally pretty happy with that, because for all its faults it does feel like a fun language to program in, for reasons I can't quite put my finger on.

I'm always a little surprised that Java is number one. I know it has a lot of enterprise support, but is there some bias in the survey here?

[pfzero]

I'm not sure if there's a bias in the results. But it seems that there shouldn't be any bias towards a particular programming language since they have an algorithm for computing the scores based on search queries on popular search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo! etc.

> Go moving from 54th to 13th most popular is pretty astonishing. I second that and although I've done a number of side projects using golang, if I want to make a presentation of the language , I wouldn't quite know for sure what are the best selling points.

I know it puts a great emphasis on concurrency and their model is rock solid and easy to reason about, but still, given that most of our work is web related and 95% of the time we have to manipulate various resources that persist to some database, I don't have a clear reason on why to choose go over php for example.

[cixin]

Well, php is still hugely popular. I think it's not an unreasonable choice (though I personally don't enjoy using it, I can see the business case).

Go feels like a much smaller, similar language though. For me, one of the key features of Go is that it's easy to refactor.

This comes partly from its lack of OO and other features, which are no doubt useful but often create more dependencies between different parts of a codebase.

In my personal programming style, I end up refactoring at lot, Go seems to make this easy.

It's naturally also possible to program like this in other languages. But Go seems to encourage and somewhat enforce it.

Due to a lack of easily abused language features I can also see it being a language well suited to teams where skill levels vary significantly.