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Ask HN: Is Go a program language I should learn

8 points by Gentleman_Ryan ↗ HN
I've been interested in Google's Go programming language for quite a while, but have been too busy to actually learn it. Has it matured enough to be readily useful if I spent the time learning it? Or if not readily useful, then at least a valuable use of my time to learn it?

5 comments

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Jabbles
I'm afraid you will get a very divided response. In my opinion, learning Go was great fun and I very much look forward to the day I am paid to use it.

In someone else's opinion: "If you're paying any attention at all to Go, you're not learning anything. In fact, it's possible you're damaging your brain. It's projects like these that make Google look really bad and unattractive to programming language researchers, especially as compared to Adobe, IBM, Sun, and Microsoft." http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3896

So there's a controversy, which thankfully means I can be impartial and yet tell you to make up your own mind by trying it out :) Which btw you can do in your browser, at http://golang.org/

preek
You're asking the wrong question. What would you like to do with it? Learn programming, Go paradigms, parallel paradigms, simply a new language? So many answers to so many different premises.

Also, take a look at this article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1891725 It sums up Go's last year.

charlesdm
I'm actually in the same situation. I'd like to give it a try for the development of a back end server for a realtime game.

Does anyone have any experience with this in Go?

uriel
I do have some experience with Go.

But what I would recommend is you get your own experience and come to your own conclusions. It is a simple enough language that doesn't take long to learn.

That or you can listen to all the FUD from people that clearly have not used Go and refuse to do it because it somehow doesn't tick enough checkboxes in their pet features checklist.

kaffiene
I was excited about Go until I started reading how it actually works. It seems to be retrograde in many respects and nowhere near a step forward with systems development languages. I see little to make you move from C++ to Go, and I hate C++.