Why I Program in Go
For the life of me I can't understand why anyone would give up the power (in terms of profiling, monitoring and ecosystem, and somewhat better performance, too) of the JVM, for a language marginally more convenient than Java, and arguably less expressive than other JVM languages. The only thing I could think of is a smaller RAM footprint, if you care about that sort of thing.<p>Whenever Go is compared to Java, the arguments in its favor seem kind of fuzzy. After all, one of the motivations behind Go was a C-like language with far better compilation time than C++. And Java already fits the bill. So, yeah, Go is leaner and more modern -- but certainly not by an order of magnitude, like other JVM languages. Here, too, the author says that he didn't like Java's IDEs (really? does Go have better tooling? Because Java IDEs really get the job done), frameworks etc. But those things are simply the result of years of changing fashions. Newer Java "frameworks" are just as lean-and-mean as Go.<p>There are so many new and exciting languages around, but Go seems to carry the least "oomph" of the lot. It's basically Java. A little nicer; a little slower; a lot less powerful.