I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Google has invented a new programming language. Isn't every other vendor doing it? But although Google Go sounds interesting, I question who's really going to use it and why.
When I first learned programming in the 1980s, the de facto language for new students was Basic. A version of Basic was available for every make of computer, and many shipped with it built into ROM. Each version differed slightly from the others, but they were similar enough that it was easy to jump from one platform to another.
[ What's the best first language for developers? Neil McAllister examines the options. | Take a visual tour of Chrome OS, Google's other new project, in our slideshow. ]
Later I graduated to "grown up" languages, including Pascal and C. These were compiled rather than interpreted, and they offered such advanced features as structured programming and direct access to hardware. Still, they were practically universal: You could find either one for almost any platform you chose.
Today things are different. In the modern, post-C world, the language programmers choose depends heavily on which IT ecosystem their programs are designed to support.
Want to write software for Mac OS X? Better learn Objective-C. Windows developers will get the most mileage out of Visual Basic or C#. And in enterprise datacenters, where IBM and Oracle middleware rules the roost, Java is the way to go -- just be sure you know whose app server you're running.
Sure, there are plenty of other options, and there's no shortage of also-ran programming languages. But over the years, a few major platform vendors have come to dominate mainstream application development, dividing the field into separate camps. Do we really need Google adding its own voice to this Babel?
Nowhere to Go but Google
In designing Go, Google started with a C-like syntax, then added and removed features as it saw fit. In other words, Google had the same idea as the designers of C#, Java, and Objective C -- to say nothing of C++, Perl, Ruby, and all the other modern, C-like languages.
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