Go may not be the language with the most features or have the longest academic pedigree but it is really good for getting stuff done. I think that the problems

Go may not be the language with the most features or have the longest academic pedigree but it is really good for getting stuff done. I think that the problems that Google were trying to solve with go are particularly relevant to the open source community. In particular simplicity encourages more contributors. The way I see it is that the big open source go projects (eg docker, kubernetes, terraform, etc) have made go popular and a good choice for code within companies who now want to hire go engineers. There are lots of little reasons for go's success in the open source world like gofmt, integrated testing, quick compile times, easy to read, godoc, single binary deploy, excellent support on all major platforms etc. In short it is really well engineered. Go projects seem to be really well engineered in general and make for reliable Lego bricks for building bigger things out of. (Go dep and vendoring have helped here.) Personally speaking go brought back the joy of programming for me getting useful stuff done (like rclone) quickly with minimal fuss and maximum reliability. Long may Go continue in the top 10!