Why Go is a good thing

I've seen quite a few posts and comments on blogs along the lines of go is just a crap version of X I can't understand why google is wasting time on it, instead of (just using | improving) X. There are several answers to this.

Firstly Go is probably different from X and does not have the same stated goals as X. Especialy where X turns out to be a high level programming language that has a very large runtime, or runs in a VM or is interpreted.

Secondly Diversity is good. Think of Go as just another mutation of C, which has some new and useful features. Having written a few tiny programs I can see two so far. The first is that even though we are statically typed it is amazing how rarely a type actually appears outside of a method signature. The implicit typing that occurs when you set variables to initial values gets things correct an awful lot of the time. And the big one is concurrency. Everyone knows that programming concurrent software is hard. As the trend these days seems to be to multi core CPU's it is also becoming a very important area. Big thing is that Every program I have written so far has included gorouteens. they are a great way to generate data (if any place you would be inclined to use a generator in Python you'll be creating a go routine.

It occurs to be that a list comprehension style syntax for defining generators would by handy here. But thats just sugar as it where and I can definitely live without it, much as I have been able to live without anonymous functions in python.

I think that Go is a worth while addition to the programming language ecosystem. And this is true weather it survives or becomes extinct.