Go First Impressions

I’m about ten hours into learning Go so far, and my first impressions are very positive. As a language it feels very much like it was designed, rather than evolved (I’m looking at you Javascript) which makes for less ambiguity in expected behaviour of a piece of code. The syntax is easy to both write and read, something of a happy middle between Python and C++, and the package management ecosystem doesn’t seem like a complete trash fire (Javascript I am once again looking at you). Coming from C# I’m not used to doing any memory management so having pointer/addresses/dereferencing etc will take a little getting used to, but so far it’s been fun to learn about them as new features of a language rather than just mapping old knowledge onto a new language.

I think whenever one learns a new language, there’s always some kind of honeymoon period (unless you’re learning PHP) and I’m sure it will wear off. In fact I think it might even be a good goal to set in terms of learning; to get proficient enough with Go that I can understand the tradeoffs made when choosing it compared to a similar language.