Even before the unprecedented news that the Typescript compiler is being rewritten in Go, I was feeling the pull towards the language Go. As a C# developer of 6 years, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with it. On one hand, it’s an incredibly productive and elegant language. Every year they add more lovely syntax sugar, and I admit I have a bit of a sweet tooth for nice syntax. But “Startup Culture” seems to shun C#, even though many of it’s ideas have influenced other languages, like being the first language with async/await.
Perhaps it’s not the language that is at fault, but the culture around C#. It’s typically used in enterprises, and C# code bases tend to be bloated and over abstracted to the point of requiring a dev to add 3-4 layers of DTO copying just to add a new endpoint. This part is also what has frustrated me lately, and so I’ve begun looking outside for a language that is simpler and used to “get shit done”.
As reported by Gergely Orosz in a recent article about startup hiring (it’s behind a paywall, sorry), he said that Typescript, Python, and Go were three languages that start ups are interested in lately, and that there’s zero interest in .NET and Java.
As an ambitions (but not young) programmer, I think the path is clear. Go lang seems to be the language for the server side, and Python is the defacto language for AI, which I also want to pursue (see Hello World). I’m already comfortable with Typescript, so I’ve decided to pick up Go and Python over the next year. With the recent news about the Typescript compiler re-write, I’m even more motivated to start hacking in Go. Hopefully I’ll find a little project to work on.
Cheers!