Having fun with Go

Originally published by Michael Hausenblas on April 24th 2016 921 reads

@mhausenblas

Michael Hausenblas

Developer Advocate

OK, I’ll start with a few confessions:

• In my daily work I mainly use Python and shell scripts with a bit of Scala and JavaScript/node mixed in, every now and then.
• I really enjoy learning new programming languages; however, to produce something useful I need a concrete trigger; some non-trivial thing I want to achieve or a reason I need the language. For example, in case of Scala, it was Apache Spark that finally made me have a second look at it and learn it ‘properly’.
• It seems to me that in the container world Go is rather popular; many companies are using it, incl. Docker, CoreOS, Google and of course ourselves, Mesosphere.
• I bought The Go Programming Language (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series) as soon as it came out and read through it, learning a few interesting things, maybe the most interesting one back then was that Go is a lovechild of CSP, Oberon and C. Given that C/C++ was with what I started out in high school a quarter of a century ago, I feel home with Go.

Now, since you now know my deepest programming language-related secrets it won’t surprise you that I’ve found something concrete I want to realize with Go and now is a good time to apply the knowledge acquired over the past months.

So far I can say one thing for sure: I love the Go language; bit like a safe, concurrent-native, functional version of C for the Internet era. I like the little things, such as importing an unused package causing a compile-time error, the approach to testing and the power of the go command line tool.

I promise to keep you updated about my Go journey and once the first results of my new side projects are available, I’ll surely write about it as well ;)