It all started seven years ago when Google announced that it was launching an open source programming language called Go. According to a Google Tech Talk, one of the creators of Go, Rob Pike, noted that no new coding languages had been written in nearly a decade. Over those ten years, computers and technology had advanced but software development was still unbearably slow.
While systems like C, C++ and Java were becoming more difficult to work with, developers were turning to dynamic languages like Python, Ruby and Javascript, languages that were easier (and more fun) to code with. At the time, says Pike, a coder could be either productive or safe with software development, but not both. Go aimed to change that. The problems with software development in 2010 were linguistic, according to Pike. Simply adding libraries wouldn’t be beneficial, in fact adding anything, he argued, would be a step in the wrong direction. It was time to start over and think about how the language is written from the bottom up. The creators of Go hoped to combine the speed of a dynamic language like Python and the performance and security features of a compiled language like C++, giving developers the best of both worlds.
So, Google Go was born. Over the last seven years, the language has proven itself suitable for business applications because of its rock solid reliability and stability. But the true measure of a programming language’s success is the projects that developers create with it as a result. According to Info World, one of the most notable software projects to be derived from Go is Docker. Considered to be a poster child for Go, Docker is a software-containerization technology that harnessed Go’s ability to work with large-scale, distributed software projects.
Twentyseven Global carefully watches emerging programming languages like Go to see how they perform as solutions for business applications. Go continues to gain traction in the software development industry and has recognized by trusted sources like GitHub as a top 10 programming language. Once languages reach a certain point of sustainability and are in the takeup phase of the technology life cycle, we add them to our portfolio to leverage for our clients’ business needs. We don’t believe the Go skillset is widely available enough to recommend Go to our clients just yet, but it is at the top of our watchlist.
