I hate listicles, and I am highly hoping that this doesn’t become one of them. Yet, I somehow felt the need to write down the reasons why I am giving Go a second (or maybe, third 🤔) chance. To the Java developers out there, searching for a new weapon of choice, I am hoping that this will give you a bit of perspective. This is not a description of Go-specific features.

My company, KI labs recently held its first hackathon in our Munich office. My team and I went for a very cool mobile app idea that promotes healthy walking competitions among colleagues and friends. Though the app itself deserves a proper introduction, I will talk about it in a separate post. This time I will focus on one problem I experienced while working on the app’s backend part, written in Go.

Last week, I made my first tentative foray into Go programming. My company uses Go in a couple of projects, but although I have heard many positive things about the language, so far I have tried to stay away from it. The mere thought that Go is a 21st Century version of C and has been explicitly designed from the start to not try to be much more than that, can make everyone coming from Kotlin and Swift pull a few hairs at first.