Golang
2019-02-16 11am

I have been trying to pick up a slightly lower level language for
some time. I read most of a book on C, but never really made much
with the language beyond exercises.  It was confusing and tricky.
I recently tried out Pascal (via the freepascal compiler) and did
end up liking it... but the current community and package support
is really poor. I could not find answers to problems and the docs
are not good.  I liked the structured nature of pascal programs a
lot.  Too bad there does not seem to be one language standard for
it (just a bunch of different implementations).

In the  end,  I finally listened to a co-worker and picked up Go.
Golang (as it is often refered to) has been interesting.  I  have
already picked it up much quicker than C.  The way  packages work
is really fantastic and the language docs are good. The community
is VERY active and  there are a lot of  answers to be found  when
problems or questions come up.   It seems quite fast and provides
good debugging and error handling support. Once I got what slices
were doing I came to really  like them as a middle ground between
static and dynamic arrays  (really,  they are just a layer on top
of a static array with some cool features).

As I have tended to lately, I am using a gopher client as a means
to learn or get better at a language. I spent the morning mapping
out the program flow  and figuring out what structs and receivers
I would need.  I'll try to update again after awhile more working
with the language.

As a funny side note: I am a big fan of Go (the abstract strategy
game also known as WeiQi or Baduk).   So now when I talk about Go
my wife always wonders at first if I am talking about the game or
the language... it usually becomes clear pretty quickly though.