Why I Love Go

Tl;dr I didn’t really know. Then Rob Pike helped me out.

“Go is awesome”, I say. “But why?”, is the reply once again, and once again I struggle to explain myself. I can recall many times I’ve seen talented people at Campus North and Golang NE communities have the same problem. It’s a common yet strange occurrence.

I was scrambling together some reasons to try and finally make clear why I think Go is so great, going into detail about the tooling, concurrency, speed and all the other justifications we use to convince the Node, Ruby and PHP interrogators that we’re not just using Go because it’s “cool”. But ultimately, there was something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

However, in November I was lucky enough to see Rob Pike, one of the smartest computer scientists of a generation, speaking at DotGo in Paris, and he dismantled my draft blog post in 23 minutes. The penny dropped and suddenly my eyes were opened over the actual reason I love writing in Go. I was never smart enough to realise it, but now it makes so much sense.

Simplicity.

Thank you Rob, for saving me from writing what would’ve been a very average post.