Rust and Go
It's not clear how much experience the author really acquired with each language, and whether that experience was sufficient experience to justify his statement:<p><i>Go felt that way to me — it was good at everything, but nothing grabbed me and made me feel excited in a way I wasn’t already about something else in my ecosystem.</i><p>He's apparently using each language to write relatively small command-line utilities. If Go is "amazing" at anything, its usually cited as a language of choice for (1) networked systems, and (2) large yet maintainable systems. I'm not sure his initial foray into the language would have provided enough experience to accurately assess those merits one way or the other.<p>Rob Pike once expressed surprise that people migrating to Go weren't C++ programmers, but Ruby/Python/etc. programmers who needed more performance. That leads you to wonder: (EDIT: removed pejoratives) if a programmer desired to switch from C/C++ to another language but hasn't by now, why not?<p>1. They require the performance benefits of C/C++ (and as humanrebar pointed out, manual memory management).<p>2. They're tied to legacy code, with too little incentive to switch.<p>3. They have an organizational mandate.<p>Any programmer who wasn't subject to the above constraints and wanted to switch could have done so before Go showed up on the scene. And if a programmer uses C or C++ solely because the above constraints, Go isn't likely to change that.<p>Rust may have a better chance of converting C++ programmers, if it offers the performance and control demanded by programmers who are using C++ by necessity. It will be interesting to see if people migrating from Python/Ruby to a higher performance language will choose Go or Rust in the future. Kind of like the OP, I like Go but I'm excited about Rust.