Final destination: Go?
Last Friday, someone on LinkedIn asked people to list the programming languages they learned and used during their life. I discovered that my list is pretty long (including all languages I only tinkered with, but still…).
Here it is in its full glory! (Believe me, I'm not trying to humblebrag. A nerd's nature and the shiny object syndrome are a dangerous combination 😬.) Stars mark languages I actually used in production.
- Sinclair ZX81 Basic
- Sinclair Spectrum Basic
- Z80 assembly
- CPM Basic
- RTOS-UH (a real-time OS and language for the Atari ST)
- Forth
- Pascal
- a little bit of Modula-2
- C
- SQL*
- C++
- Eiffel
- Sather
- Logo
- Prolog
- Visual Basic
- C#
- Objective-C
- AppleScript
- Java*
- JavaScript
- eScript* (a JS dialect for Siebel CRM)
- Bash
- Fish
- Perl
- Python
- Lua
- Go*
Yes, Go is literally at the end of the list. For most of my life since I got my ZX81 (at the age of 13), I had been searching for the “perfect” language. Spoiler alert: There is no such thing. Go, however, comes pretty close! The language and its ecosystem check A LOT of boxes that few languages have in that extent.
When I first came across Go, I was immediately hooked, and it didn't take long until I felt that I can stop my (futile) search for the “perfect” language.
Go is the unglamorous get-shit-done language I've been looking for.