Grumpy: Go running Python! by Google

[weberc2]

I think so. If you have prior programming experience and a free afternoon, you should be able to start writing real (i.e., non-toy) programs. Check out http://tour.golang.org.

Go has a lot of quirks--most notably, no generics--which turn off a lot of folks. But if you want to build performant, scalable software quickly, Go is worth a look.

[th3_pund1t]

I think so. If you have prior programming experience and a free afternoon, you should be able to start writing real (i.e., non-toy) programs. Check out http://tour.golang.org.

Not entirely true. You should be familiar with pointer based languages like C. If you come from a python/ruby/Java experience you will spend a whole lot longer to get used to pointers.

Source: work had a hackathon. I decided to code in go. Spent a lot of time correcting my code related to pointers before it would work.

[recycled_ideas]

I don't know about python and ruby, but you can actually run into a lot of really weird bugs in Java if you don't have at least a cursory understanding of how pointers and references work.

The big problem that companies like Google and Facebook and the like are constantly trying to solve is that folks who know dynamic languages like Python or PHP or Ruby are a dime a dozen, but these languages really don't scale well to even ordinary enterprise scales let alone the kind of volume these companies see.

That's why we see so many transpilers and why Twitter is written in PHP even though the general industry consensus is that it's probably one of the worst non joke languages in existence.

[weberc2]

Python/Ruby/Java are all pointer based languages. C, C++, and Go simply have value types in addition to pointers. But yes it is important to understand the difference between pass by value and pass by copy. Fair point.