Golang is like a touring car. It's fast, but doesn't have the fastest engine. It's got some nice features, and it's comfortable (at least for the driver), but it doesn't have every bell and whistle. But: the handling is amazing; it's a monster in the corners.
You could give a BMW M3 a faster engine, or a more full-featured Bluetooth sound system, but it's the way the steering wheel feels that makes people love that car. Same with Golang. They did an extraordinary job balancing the language, especially if you're the kind of programmer (a systems developer) that appreciates that kind of balance.
Normally, if I see a car analogy applied to programming languages (which hackers seem to do a lot), I instantly brace myself for petty debate on the semantics of the analogy itself (which hackers seem to do a lot).
This one is perfect however, and really explains my feelings towards Go (and recently, C, oddly enough).
>especially if you're the kind of programmer (a systems developer) that appreciates that kind of balance.
Go really failed to appeal to a lot of systems programmers, despite their intentions. Go is picking up people who used untyped languages and still didn't accept that static typing does not mean java. They finally have a simplistic statically typed language that isn't java to use.
This is more "Internet article of faith" than actual fact; it's something people say because it was said in some blog post once. For whatever it's worth to you, I've been a systems programmer since ~1995. The lingua franca of systems programming is C; Golang's type system is strictly superior to C.
It is more "direct observation" than "internet article of faith". I know one person who likes C and go. Every other go convert I know came from a scripting language. Golang's type system is strictly inferior to D.
You could give a BMW M3 a faster engine, or a more full-featured Bluetooth sound system, but it's the way the steering wheel feels that makes people love that car. Same with Golang. They did an extraordinary job balancing the language, especially if you're the kind of programmer (a systems developer) that appreciates that kind of balance.