I read an article on ReadWriteWeb, commenting on Google’s announcement that their Go language reached 1.0. I took a quick look, as I did when it was first publicly announced. As then and now, it looks interesting but I personally can’t see it fit in any of the initiatives I am involved in at the moment.
One thing that is constant, and actually infuriating with these new programming language announcements is the way they are presented. Many would showcase a Hello World, Fibonacci, writing a Blog Web site, or writing a To Do List application. I don’t know about you but I’ve rarely come across a real-world problem involving any of these examples. I think it as a form of escapism.
Another problem with any new programming language is that people have to go through a stage of “brainwashing” before they become really productive. That may be luxury for a lot of people at the moment. And lastly, even if a language is great you would be swimming upstream unless you could count on a large amount of libraries to tap into. In that department, the recent wave of JVM based languages are doing well. Even Microsoft, who normally have a massive install base, understood this and is working very hard to bridge its languages with the open source communities out there. I am not yet seeing how Go will help developers get the most out of existing libraries. This also makes me think that it is not targeted at the larger developer community.
It seems that Google Go would suit scaling issues that are mainly due to application execution (CPU) bottlenecks, so not disk or network performance bottlenecks which are actually more common. Targeting those who’d have to otherwise program in C means that Google expects a niche market for this language. Companies like Facebook and Twitter may have good use cases, but those don’t look to be the best of friends with Google nowadays. Would traditional enterprise development groups rush to adopt Google Go? I doubt it.
I am curious how the reactions would be like over next few months.