I think students always complain the first couple times they are forced to learn new languages, but this is an important skill for them to master. There were s

I think students always complain the first couple times they are forced to learn new languages, but this is an important skill for them to master. There were several student complaints about the lack of an IDE or debugger. These tools do exist: I use LiteIDE, with syntax highlighting, code autocomplete and built in Go debugging everyday. Perhaps the professor was not aware of LiteIDE, but his students could have used Google. http://code.google.com/p/liteide/ http://code.google.com/p/liteide/ https://github.com/visualfc/liteide https://github.com/visualfc/liteide Go also has great built-in profiling support: http://blog.golang.org/2011/06/profiling-go-programs.html http://blog.golang.org/2011/06/profiling-go-programs.html Installing Go is easy, you can download it as an archive or use your package manager: http://code.google.com/p/go/downloads/list http://code.google.com/p/go/downloads/list aptitude install golang-go Also even installing Go from source is easy: cd ~/ hg clone -u release https://code.google.com/p/go cd ~/go/src/ ./all.bash I think the hardest part is the environment variables, but these are well documented.