> For me, Go has become the new Ruby. A language I use to get things done, and enjoy programming again. Despite my annoyance with the direction that Go's taken

> For me, Go has become the new Ruby. A language I use to get things done, and enjoy programming again. Despite my annoyance with the direction that Go's taken since 1.10, this line really resonates with me. TL;DR Windows + PHP + slow laptop drove me to put away my childish anti-Google fears for a weekend and try Go, and for the first time since I started coding (with Pascal) I enjoyed programming. Cool story: Around late 2010, after a few years of using (btw, Arch) Linux exclusively, I was given a slow Windows laptop for work. The laptop came with Windows Vista IIRC and the whole experience of writing PHP code on an unfamiliar OS combined with a slow laptop was just misery - it was even worse than my memories of Windows ME/XP. I tried everything to get a familiar Linux env going: Cygwin, msys, KDE... and it just added insult to injury. Anyway, soon after, it was Go's birthday so it was in the news again and one weekend I decided to put away my childish anti-Google fears and try it and I never looked back. Something about the simplicity, its lack of CMake, Makefiles, latest build-system-of-the-week, dynamic linking hell, C++ complexity, D and its 2 std libs, etc. was a breath of fresh air. Before even falling in love the the concurrency primitives, I started writing "bash scripts" in Go - something I do to this day. I even started writing prototypes in Go to then port them to PHP and Python because I could write the inefficient, naive, brute-force code to validate an idea... and it'd still end up being faster and use less memory than the code the was deployed to production. I later also discovered that my shitty naive linters written in Go that parsed and checked whole PHP packages every time I saved a file ran near instantly compared to the heavy disk-destroying IDE indexing - it was crazy.