Why Go

27 Aug 2023 - Daniel Ramirez

Firstly, it’s just a nice language. I’ve heard it described as the programming equivalent of eating your vegetables. I’d consider it eating broccoli slathered in cheese sauce. Not everyone likes it because it makes an attempt to make vegetables palatable.

But that is not why…

Ok, why?

Go is interesting in contrast to technologies like Ruby, Python, JavaScript, and that ilk that remind one of (to continue the food analogy) junk food. They allow for a disregard for, among other things, performance and simplicity. I will not prove this, you know this to be true or you don’t. The sinking guilt that oneself and one’s team is indulging in teeth rotting candy does not feel good.

Go is compelling out of the selection of other languages like Rust, Zig, C++, Nim, etc. because it’s approach to softening for transition from junk to healthy food is quite nice. Really, it’s good programming language marketing. Few people do a research paper on why they are testing out another language so all it really takes is a couple hard hitting “features”.

“Features”

Features as in those checkboxes on a sales page that is trying to get your money, except in this case they want your mind-share.

What’s the goal?

I don’t want to be a one tricky pony that can work on a certain web-dev stack and nothing else.

I think the best way to do that is to start at a lower level of programming to really understand what is going on up top.

I think the best way to do that is by finding an “old-school” language, statically-typed, compiled, non-OOP, and write something that’s closer to the metal.

For me that looks like

• Write a TUI game
• Contribute to open source
• Finish the ASL compiler
• Write a toy web server
• Write a toy terminal

Ok, so it’s not about Go

No, lol

Conclusion

I hope to come back to this journal/blog/article and provide meaningful updates to my progress towards becoming a more well rounded programmer.