I'm an old python hacker, and while I appreciate C/C++ the most I've done with them is set up bridges with ctypes so I can call compiled libraries from python.

I'm an old python hacker, and while I appreciate C/C++ the most I've done with them is set up bridges with ctypes so I can call compiled libraries from python. Go, to me, feels like it has some of the expressiveness and discoverability of python, with the added bonus of type safety and raw performance of C (for my purposes, at least). For most of my small projects, it fits a nice niche. Any time I need a lightweight HTTP/JSON API to talk with a fancy javascript frontend, Go is slowly becoming my tool of choice -- especially if it may end up on other platforms (including Windows). When I wanted to learn Go I set aside a Saturday to grok the docs and "getting started" guide, and was surprised to find I finished by 10am (including a coffee break). The language itself is very small, and I found myself successfully "guessing" at structs and function signatures very early. It's at least worth exploring, especially given the tooling for web, opengl, and android.