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Google's Go Language Surges In Popularity (infoworld.com)
2016 saw a big spike in the popularity of Go, attributed to the rising importance of Docker and Kubernetes. An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes InfoWorld:
Ranked 65th a year ago in the Tiobe Index of language popularity, it has climbed to 16th this month and is on track to become Tiobe's Programming Language of the Year, a designation awarded to the language with the biggest jump in the index...which gauges popularity based on a formula assessing searches on languages in popular search engines...
Elsewhere in the index, Java again came in first place, with an 18.799 rating while C, still in second place, nonetheless continued its precipitous drop, to 9.835% (it had been 16.185% a year ago). In third was C++ (5.797%) followed by C# (4.367%), Python (3.775%), JavaScript (2.751%), PHP (2.741%), Visual Basic .Net (2.66%), and Perl (2.495%).
The article also cites an alternate set of rankings. "In the PyPL index, the top 10 were: Java, with a share of 23.4%, followed by Python (13.6%), PHP (9.9%), C# (8.8%), JavaScript (7.6%), C++ (6.9%), C (6.9%), Objective-C (4.5%), R (3.3%), and Swift (3.1%)."
Elsewhere in the index, Java again came in first place, with an 18.799 rating while C, still in second place, nonetheless continued its precipitous drop, to 9.835% (it had been 16.185% a year ago). In third was C++ (5.797%) followed by C# (4.367%), Python (3.775%), JavaScript (2.751%), PHP (2.741%), Visual Basic .Net (2.66%), and Perl (2.495%).
The article also cites an alternate set of rankings. "In the PyPL index, the top 10 were: Java, with a share of 23.4%, followed by Python (13.6%), PHP (9.9%), C# (8.8%), JavaScript (7.6%), C++ (6.9%), C (6.9%), Objective-C (4.5%), R (3.3%), and Swift (3.1%)."
It fills nicely the niche between low and high-level languages. You get C-like semantics, modern data structures, memory management and high performance with fast compiled binaries.
Also, it is one of the few languages out there where concurrency is not an afterthought.
As somebody who started writing it about 75% of the time at my job starting earlier this year, I found it weird at first because it's pretty different from other popular languages. But once you get used to writing it, it really does become transparent and second nature.
Go billed itself as a systems programming language. I dont know about that, but Go is useful if you need massive concurrency. Goroutines make it trivial to spin up new threads and keep things in sync. In fact, the entire language seems to revolve around that concept.
Go is strongly typed, so you get the benefit of eliminating certain classes of errors at compile time. Speaking of which, the compiler produces very fast code.
Some of the weaknesses of go are that it lacks support for generics (and developers are hostile towards the idea), it has a weak stdlib (well, compared to python or rust anyway) and the syntax is kinda weird.
My opinion is this: If you just need a general purpose programming language, go doesn't give you anything new. It sits in a strange place where it is not c but also not quite high level, so you get high-levelish things (such as goroutines) but you still need to deal with c type annoyances.
You are better off with python, java, c# or even c++ in most cases.
But if you need lots of concurrency, and can live with the limitations, go is ok.
You get C-like semantics, modern data structures...
Modern data structures without classes or generics? This is where I checked out on Go after initially being interested.
memory management and high performance with fast compiled binaries....
And no way to avoid the memory management, a crippling problem shared with Java that makes it a bad choice for many applications (e.g., low latency financial transactions). Face it, Go is a bland language with really only one thing going for it: promoted by Google. Much like C# is promoted by Microsoft, which didn't overcome the mind share issues of that platform either.
It's just not clear what problem Go solves better than any alternative. If you want highest performance and lots of big team software engineering support, you go with C++. If you need managed memory and access to the copious supply of 2 year diploma programmers and don't mind throwing a bit more hardware at your problem you go with Java. If you need to churn out web2 sites as fast as possible then Node or Python. It's just not clear where the demand for Go is supposed to come from. From where I sit, Go is just another pretender to the Java throne, not any less bland than the incumbent and decades late to the party.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I'm a long time C programmer, and I like Go a little better than C for concurrent programs. It's not quite as ground breaking as something like Erlang, but it's quite a bit easier to throw something together to run reasonably well on a cluster than say Java. I wouldn't want to write a kernel in Go, but it's pretty hard to displace C in that niche.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I bet half the people who said "C" actually meant C++. There's really no reason to use C except in projects that are already in C, since C++ is an almost exact superset of C. So you can write everything in a procedural style, but still use STL and strings, and other minimal conveniences.
You may note this massive, unprecedented serge is usage happened at the same time as pokemon go got very popular.
It will drop massively over the next few months because the system wasn't picking up references to the language, rather false positives to pokemon.