It's worth reiterating that Go was created by Google to solve Google's problems. If it also solves your problems, or a worthwhile subset thereof, then that is a happy serendipity, but it's not a design goal.
"The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt." – Rob Pike 1
The problem Go solves is that google has a bunch of people who can hack out code, but don't really know the theory of computer science, can't understand high level abstractions and complex type systems... So they need a language for "the average programmer", or as pg would say, "the blub programmer".
They invented the blub language. Blub programmers are everywhere at google, and they are everywhere in the industry, so its primary design goal is applicable to almost every company in the world.
I agree that this is a real problem, but newer languages like Swift and Rust are targeting newbie coders while keeping the benefits of advanced type systems. The key is to surface errors in compiler diagnostics, so that the newbie coders know when they're getting it wrong. It's using the compiler as a friendly TA. Golang doesn't really solve the problems of newbies, it just punts the issues to runtime where they will likely end up causing breakage in production.
No, it was created by a group of distinguished engineers who just wanted to create a language they liked. As I understand it they wanted to improve on C but take a radically different direction from C++, which they disliked.
Rather than being explicitly designed for problems Google was facing, it took a fair amount of time to find a niche (initially, log processing).
Go was created to solve the problem of how to write real world code solving practical problems in the space of backends, systems (not system) programming and microservices, where performance matters, with a language that is easy to learn, the code of which is easy to read and maintain, which is easy to understand for tooling, and which lends itself naturally to projects where many coders of different skill levels and personal preference work on the same thing.
I believe that it is very much a problem many entities that aren't Google like to have a good solution for.
These things are quite subjective. In practice though, Go lacks the kinds of features that would make very large scale codebases (the sorts of codebases where "many coders ... work on the same thing") truly surveyable, understandable and easily maintained. I mean, it's not a complete disaster like Python or JavaScript. It has some features to support modularity and programming "in the large". But other modern languages like Rust or even Swift are quite a bit better on that side of things, and it shows.
TheDong|2 years ago
In the words of Rob Pike:
"The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt." – Rob Pike 1
The problem Go solves is that google has a bunch of people who can hack out code, but don't really know the theory of computer science, can't understand high level abstractions and complex type systems... So they need a language for "the average programmer", or as pg would say, "the blub programmer".
They invented the blub language. Blub programmers are everywhere at google, and they are everywhere in the industry, so its primary design goal is applicable to almost every company in the world.
zozbot234|2 years ago
iainmerrick|2 years ago
Rather than being explicitly designed for problems Google was facing, it took a fair amount of time to find a niche (initially, log processing).
usrbinbash|2 years ago
I believe that it is very much a problem many entities that aren't Google like to have a good solution for.
zozbot234|2 years ago
These things are quite subjective. In practice though, Go lacks the kinds of features that would make very large scale codebases (the sorts of codebases where "many coders ... work on the same thing") truly surveyable, understandable and easily maintained. I mean, it's not a complete disaster like Python or JavaScript. It has some features to support modularity and programming "in the large". But other modern languages like Rust or even Swift are quite a bit better on that side of things, and it shows.