Very cool. Maybe Go will win some people back to the strongly typed language realm. Having the compiler acts as a safety net is pretty awesome. Much better than having your code blow up at run time with dynamic languages.
I think there is selection bias, but in the other way. Web programmers, as your typical HN goer sees them, probably tend to underestimate just how many other programmers there are out there, particularly doing Java work.
Beneath the bleeding edge of "what is cool" and "what cool companies use" there is a very large iceberg of people and companies doing/using things that stopped being cool a decade ago.
Well, it looks like the overwhelming majority of web programming is done in PHP/ASP, so I guess it's not the case so much for web developers.
Although I'd be amazed if Go won over a significant portion of the PHP/ASP crowd, given that they have already self-selected out of using Ruby, Python, etc. for web development instead.
I suppose you could argue that Go is a good fit for PHP/ASP programmers who have really tuned their applications for performance, but I strongly suspect they're a small minority.
All programs can blow up at run time, the real question is if "strongly typed" is a good tradeoff. How many actual bugs does the compiler catch? Is it worth the extra pain?
Also, dynamic languages has a tendency to "blow up" in less serious ways..
This is great. I'm still fairly new to programming and all my experience until now has been confined to dynamically-typed, interpreted languages (other than a little dabbling into C for learning's sake), so I'm really appreciative of any efforts to clearly illustrate new languages to newbies like me. I would love to see something like this for Haskell or Clojure if anyone knows of any good links.