This week I have been dabbling into the foundations of the Go programming language. I’ve been hearing a lot about it, and decided that I wanted to do the absolute foundations, and not try to jump straight to building the next killer app.
I’ve been following the online Go lang book and one or two basic introductions to the language from Youtube videos.
My main motivation for learning the basics of Go was because I felt I needed to get back into programming, having not done it commercially for a number of months.
I have done some basics, like learning how to do variables, for-loops, basic structs, functions, outputting to the terminal. I have yet to learn how to create tests, and I’m still uncertain what I will use it for.
My initial thoughts on the language are that its reasonably okay to learn, it isn’t as straight forward as it likes to advertise itself with.
I still prefer Swift.
Yes, they are designed to do different things, Go is like an updated C and is more concerned with the compiled high-level programming side; the kind of things you might expect from desktop or more critical infrastructure; whereas Swift is aimed at getting developers into making mobile apps.
They solve different problems.
So why learn it? I wanted to give it a go, and I’ve been hearing a lot about it from forums, Youtube videos and I want to show that I am constantly learning, even if it just doing introductory steps.
Whilst I do not consider myself an expert in all things Go; it is something I will keep a watch on, and will try to continue to do little bits to learn it.