[danesparza]

"Go isn't for programmers, it's for managers"

I completely disagree with this statement. Some of the most high-performance modern platform-level code written is currently written in Go.

It was a Google presentation that examined their efforts to convert their download site to Go (from C/C++) that got my attention. It's easier to read, has a simpler mental model, and faster than its C/C++ cousin.

[skohan]

I'm not sure that the points you raise contradict my thesis. Could it not be the case that a language designed primarily for making large software teams easier to manage would also lead to high-quality software at large organizations?

[rob74]

If the thesis is that "Go is for managers", then yes. I would wholeheartedly agree to something like "Go is not for developers who want to write clever code that others (or they themselves in a few months' time) may have trouble understanding". But Go also works for large teams (communities) of open source developers who don't have what you would usually call "management", so saying it's only for managers is definitely too narrow a statement...

[skohan]

I basically agree; I think claiming "go is for managers" was a bit flip of me to say, but what I generally mean is that Go is more optimized for operational concerns than for the joy of programming. It's also not a pejorative: there's a lot of good reasons you might choose Go and why you might like it as a programmer.