First impressions from the Go programming language

I spent the last week or so learning the new programming language release from Google called Go. The first program I written this a simple text processing tool. That is the kind of tools I've previously written in Python and Ruby. I would say that Python is still better suited for this kind of job. However that is mainly due to less functional regular expressions and string libraries found in Go. Although it is unavoidable that when using a statically typed language there is a bit more overhead. In particular with respect to typing.

Compared to regular statically typed languages

However for a statically typed language I can't find anything that can compare. I could write code in a manner to remind me a lot of how it feels to write code and script language. Other languages which I'm familiar with like C++, Objective-C, Java are much more verbose and clunky to use. Those are languages which encourage much more planning and feels better suited for larger applications.

C is a simple language but it lack so much features that it becomes cumbersome to do string processing. No string class and a bit too code spent managing memory.

Compared to Haskell and C#

Of course there are other statically typed languages like Haskell and C#. Now Haskell is probably a more innovative and elegant language then Go. But it is also the language requires much more understanding before it can be used productively. Most developers are not intimate with the functional languages. Especially pure functional languages like Haskell. With Go on the other hand I could use the skills I had developed while using languages like Python, C++ and C. That meant I could be productive quite quickly. With a sharp unafraid to comment because so much has happened without language to last year's and I haven't used in years. I know at least that the C# that I used to use could not compete with Go in ease-of-use.

Compared to Scheme

I have written text processing utility and scheme previously. The whole development process is nicer than most other languages I think. Mainly because of the interactive style development that scheme allows. I could quickly and easily test segments of my code in the interactive shell because everything in scheme is an expression. In this respect go is as cumbersome as any other traditional language. You run test your program one file at a time.

Of course came that same problem as Haskell. You can easily reuse programming skills developed while using C and C++ for many years. It's cumbersome to get used to reading scheme code that takes time to get used to what functions are called and how to print special characters like newline etc.