Why Go is my favorite programming language
When Java was first introduced, the world was abuzz about this cool new language which you could &quot;write once, run anywhere&quot;.  It took some time, but as it grew in popularity, articles started appearing about how much Java sucked because it was slow and bloated, required a ton of boilerplate code, and eventually because &quot;write once, run anywhere&quot; turned out to be a myth, along with a boatload of other reasons.  The honeymoon wore off, and legions of Java-haters were born.<p>Perl suffered a similar fate.  When it came out unix was just surging in popularity with the internet boom and a lot of people were thrilled to have a single language you could learn which combined the features of common command-line tools like sed and awk, and that was a &quot;real programming language&quot; that was more powerful than shell scripting, and which grew to have a ton of useful libraries in the form of CPAN.  Years later, and Python and Ruby started getting popular, the &quot;Perl sucks!&quot; mantra sprang up and the once-mighty Perl shrank before the upstarts.<p>Ruby and Python are getting their turn now, and I&#x27;m starting to see some people expressing hate towards them as well, though it hasn&#x27;t quite reached the pervasiveness of Java and Perl hate yet.<p>Go was next.  People were excited about this cool new language from Google, a place filled with great engineers, and from the mind of Rob Pike, of Unix and Plan 9 fame.  It was supposed to be like a simpler and more elegant form of C.  What&#x27;s not to like.  Well, the replies to this post are showing that for some the honeymoon is already over.<p>Other languages had their day in the limelight, only to wind up being hated: C++, Lisp, Fortran, Cobol, HTML, Javascript.<p>Bjarne Stroustrup observed that <i>&quot;there are two types of languages, the ones everyone complains about, and the ones nobody uses.&quot;</i><p>Whenever some shiny new language comes out, promising to solve everyone&#x27;s problems in some domain, and people start jumping on the bandwagon and singing its praises to high heaven (which seems to happen ever couple of years), I try to take a deep breath and step back.  There will likely come a day, before too long, when they too will be subject to hatred and scorn, just as all the other popular languages before them.