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Programming Language Go Turns 8 (golang.org)
On this day, eight years ago, a group of programmers at Google released Go, a brand-new open-source programming language that they hoped would solve some of the problems they faced with Java, C++ and other programming languages. In the past eight years, Go has gotten a tremendous traction, with Go helping drive several services running inside Google. The company, on its part, has added a handful of features to Go, including a revamped garbage collector in 2015, and support for various ARM processors. From a blog post: Go has been embraced by developers all over the world with approximately one million users worldwide. In the freshly published 2017 Octoverse by GitHub, Go has become the #9 most popular language, surpassing C. Go is the fastest growing language on GitHub in 2017 in the top 10 with 52% growth over the previous year. In growth, Go swapped places with Javascript, which fell to the second spot with 44%. In Stack Overflow's 2017 developer survey, Go was the only language that was both on the top 5 most loved and top 5 most wanted languages. People who use Go, love it, and the people who aren't using Go, want to be. [...] Since Go was first open sourced we have had 10 releases of the language, libraries and tooling with more than 1680 contributors making over 50,000 commits to the project's 34 repositories; More than double the number of contributors and nearly double the number of commits from only two years ago. This year we announced that we have begun planning Go 2, our first major revision of the language and tooling.
I didn't think anyone was still using GO. 8 years is venerable for a "fashion" language.
The Hyperledger Blockchain system uses Go for writing chaincode contracts: https://www.hyperledger.org/
I have no idea why that was chosen . . . but I think your "fashion" statement has a lot to do with it.
On the other hand, serious potential blockchain users, banks and insurance companies, are very wary about using such a "young" language. At least with Java, we have spent a lot of time identifying security issues, and programmers have had a lot of time to learn it well.
With Go . . . we'll be just starting with the security issues and other quirks with the language.
So, when is Google going to offer Go as a development option on Android . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
It is the _MOST_ difficult language for examining someone else's code and trying to figure out what is going on.
AHEM. Perl much?