I'm a Python guy, and there's something in this, I think. One of Python's underrated virtues is how uncontroversial a lot of Python idioms are. The "only one wa

I'm a Python guy, and there's something in this, I think. One of Python's underrated virtues is how uncontroversial a lot of Python idioms are. The "only one way to do it" attitude helps there. In my (limited, biased) experience, there's three camps among the Python community: 1. people who want principle-of-least-surprise: there's a lot to be said for boring languages (if the language is the most interesting thing about your product...). Often the systems engineering/service engineering crowd. 2. people who want it to be more functional – the Haskell/Scala/ML crowd. (I guess the overlap between camp 1 and camp 2 is Erlang...) 3. people who want access to the library ecosystem, particularly the Numpy/Scipy/Pandas/Theano stack (the scientific community, latterly data scientists). This is my tribe. So you've got three crowds here, at least, unified by a language. Where are they going to head? Go has nothing for the second crowd; they're all going to go to a purer FP language sooner or later. It doesn't have much for the third (no IPython, LAPACK bindings, Fortran bindings, stats libraries, machine learning, etc...); we all have an eye on Julia. But for the first: great deployment story, small language, decent standard libraries, markedly better performance than Python, much better parallelism story...