[Xeoncross]

For a lot of people like me, Go was something of a better scripting language.

It wasn't as hard to grok as C or Rust, it wasn't as slow as Ruby, Python or PHP. most of all, it it was designed to make use of multiple cores. Surprisingly, having testing and formatting built into the tooling is also a huge win after spending years debating and changing choices in scripting land.

Go is the new PHP/Node.js and Rust is the replacement for everything else. I know this is technically wrong, but that's how it feels.

[tech_tuna]

Agreed 100%. I've used a bunch of languages over the years: C, C++, C#, VB, Perl, Java/Groovy/Kotlin, Javascript, Lua, Ruby, PHP, Python and Go. All fairly mainstream and I'm not going to start railing on the ones I don't like. . . so let's just say Python was the first language that I loved and Go is my current favorite.

For me, readability, simplicity and having compile time checks are wonderful. Go feels like a better Python. I still enjoy using Python but "runtime is funtime" even with type hinting and linting and everything else.

I am also a sucker for good tooling and a pleasant dev experience. Go has fantastic tooling. That being said, it has its warts and weak points. If I need to write something quick and dirty, I prefer Python. If I need to parse JSON and I don't have an easy way to generate client code, I prefer Python.

There are some quirky bits in Go I don't particularly like e.g. the reversal of parameter type and name in function signatures. . . that just confuses me because I typically am using 2-4 different languages in any given week and Go is the weirdo in this regard. :)

I would be thrilled to see Rust become the dominant systems programming language some day. I'm planning to learn it as soon as it looks like the right choice for me - for most of my work, Python + Go + bash (I love and hate bash) are more than sufficient.

[Sohcahtoa82]

> I still enjoy using Python but "runtime is funtime" even with type hinting and linting and everything else.

I'd love to see a s̶t̶r̶o̶n̶g̶ statically-typed Python that could throw type errors at compile time. I've only taken advantage of the duck typing once, and the way I did it was a massive code smell and I ended up refactoring it out anyways.

[kortex]

You mean statically typed? Python is already strongly typed.

Try running it through mypy with all the strict options. If you can get it to 100% pass and don't try to "cheat" the system too much with dynamic casts, I think you will find runtime type errors to be very rare.

[Sohcahtoa82]

> You mean statically typed? Python is already strongly typed.

Err...yes. I forget that "strong" and "static" are not the same and that "strong" and "duck" are not mutually exclusive.

[robertlagrant]

Mypy gets you a lot of the way there.

[crowdyriver]

My feelings exactly. I love go because of how productive and resilient can be. In months programming in it I've barely had any null pointer exceptions. If it compiles, and passes the linters, it mostly works aswell.

[Xeoncross]

Yeah, null pointers and the compiler writing more code for you (overlaps with generics) are pretty high on my wish list.

I'm bringing someone up in Go and they forget to initialize some map or struct: `&Foo{data:map[int]int{}}` and crash the app.