What Is Golang? An Introduction into Go Programming Language

Go or Golang is an open-source programming language designed by Google. It was built to be simple, readable and efficient, as well as useful for multiple purposes such as building apps, web development, data science and cloud computing.

The high-performing Golang programming language is compiled and statically typed, making it easy to learn even if you are a beginner. It obviously helps if you have prior knowledge of another programming language, but even complete newbies can call upon a supportive and active Golang community to help guide them through the process of building an app.

Origins of Go Programming Language

The popular origin story of Golang is that it was originally created by computer scientists and programmers Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson. Google’s codebases were becoming more and more complex, and Go’s designers agreed that C++ (one of the main programming languages at that time and still relatively popular today) was not the best language for the systems they were building.

The name was originally just Go, with Golang (.org) being the address of the official website, which is simply a portmanteau of ‘Go Language’. However, with Golang being a much more searchable term than the word Go on its own, Golang has become synonymous with Go.

Go was announced to the public in 2009, with its 1.0 version becoming open source in 2012. The simplicity and readability of Go, along with its efficiency and its ability to run multiple tasks at the same time, meant it became popular among many developers very quickly.

Today, the Go programming language is used for a wide variety of purposes including making command-line tools along with backend and cloud-based programming. It is also used for game development and data science, which involves creating programming code and combining it with statistical knowledge to generate insights from large batches of data.

Benefits of Using Golang

Go is now an established presence in the top ten of ‘Loved’ programming and scripting languages in the StackOverFlow annual survey. It ranked 8th on the 2022 list with a 64.58% ‘Loved’ rating, which was a full 17 places above C++ which Go was designed to replace.

A lot of the love is down to Go being easy to learn compared to others. Anyone with a little prior knowledge of programming languages will find it very simple to pick up, while absolute beginners will make much faster progress than they will with other more complicated programming languages.

There is also a lot of support for anyone using Go, as there is lots of easy-to-read documentation available on the official Golang website. There is an active community which can help whenever a developer gets lost or needs some advice, with the hashtag #golang also frequently used on Twitter to ask questions or share resources.

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