I learned about the Go programming language when it was announced back in November 2009. It probably happend when it popped up on HN. There was a lot to like about it, even way back then. I’ve always had a list of things that I’d want in my hypothetical perfect programming languages and go ticked off more of them than any other language at the time. Spoiler alert: It still does.

I really sat down to learn the language in early/mid 2011. The language itself didn’t hit 1.0 until early 2012. I can’t find the original repo, but some of that code still powers this blog today.

A lot of the original design holds up well. Goroutines, fast compilation, static typing, interfaces, gofmt, defer, small core, broad standard library that included a webstack in particular. Some of the original quirks (no warnings, capitalization for public/private, disallow unused imports/vars, etc.) took no time at all to get over despite the internet opinions of the time. In fact, most of those look like great decisions in hindsight. As an app developer, I haven’t needed generics much. I love the error handling philosophy and wrote my own error wrapper†. It’s part of why go codebases end up reliable.

Not only that but Go has been improving itself over time. It’s ecosystem and early killer apps will keep it around and popular for a long time going forward. I can like a language, but that doesn’t mean that language will gain any reasonable popularity. And popularity is important. You need a critical mass of users to have a reasonable ecosystem.

Go itself has influenced my options on things like GC. Back in 2009, I was a big fan of ObjC/Swift’s ARC and Rust-style lifetime management (even though Rust wasn’t around back then). These days, I prefer that something else thinks about memory management for me. The performance ramifications of GC are no longer relevant.

Go is one of my secret weapons. It still allows me to get from idea to production faster than anything else out there. The positive words I wrote about Go in 2013 still hold up.

The first blog post†† on this particular blog briefly touched on the nascent, early, promising language back in 2011 included these lines:

[Go] is a tremendous productivity multiplier. I wish my competitors to use other lesser means of craft.

That is still something I wish.

^† I need to update it for the go.mod era, but it still works great.↩

^†† If you read that post, you’ll find the writing style… different. I’m both proud and ashamed of younger me.↩