[slurgfest]

It doesn't seem to me that there is a whole lot of overlap between the virtues or sweet spot of PHP and those of Go.

Go is not a particularly hard language for the level it's designed at (though I'm not sure that remembering keywords is really a primary usability concern for any language)... but if you are just trying to slap together a web app and feel intimidated by deploy details and want to use cheap shared hosting and plug into existing libraries as much as possible, Go is somewhere between inconvenient and totally infeasible.

I'm not saying Go is a bad choice... there are good reasons to look at it, particularly if you intend to work at a somewhat lower level (e.g. for performance) and want some of Go's benefits (like the concurrency model, or some of the benefits of static typing and compiling without so much time or effort on managing dependencies as you would otherwise spend, etc.)

I'm saying the priorities which would make PHP attractive would tend to make Go quite unattractive. I can certainly see how PHP programmers (like many other programmers) can benefit from learning another language with abilities complementary to what they already know.

[andrewfelix]

Agreed. I was interested up until this point..."Your PHP scripts will be evaluated by SAPI components: web server module, PHP-fpm or CLI. All needed for PHP deploying is a SAPI environment."

What? Sorry but I know nothing about deployment. Should I? In the past I've only used PHP to solve simple problems.

[Mikushi]

You don't necessarily need to know about the SAPI, but what he says is true. Any environment (Apache, Lighttpd, FPM, CLI, ...) that runs PHP, is built on top of the SAPI provided by the Zend Engine.

That's interesting stuff, but not on the "must know" list.

[gnur]

I agree, and luckily he touches that subject a little at the end of the article, the line: "In any case, most of PHPers alwasy need to learn other languages for the backend development." Pretty much sums up exactly why a PHP developer should learn Go. For all the things that PHP just isn't meant to do.

[zippoxer]

Look at lowendbox.com and say that hosting Go is inconvenient again. Heroku and GAE are supporting Go too.