Developers are beginning to program in Go both at work and outside of work. Go is an open-source programming language Google created in 2007. The programming language’s team has released its 2016 survey results, which revealed 89% of respondents are using Go.
Of that 89%, 36% use Go both at home and at work, 27% use Go only at home, and 23% use Go only at work.
“Users are overwhelmingly happy with Go: they agree that they would recommend Go to others by a ratio of 19:1, that they’d prefer to use Go for their next project (14:1), and that Go is working well for their teams (18:1). Fewer users agree that Go is critical to their company’s success (2.5:1),” Steve Francia, technical program manager for the Go team, wrote in a post.
When asked what language developers would use both in terms of expertise and preference, the top five languages were Go, Python, Java, JavaScript and C. Go was also recently won the TIOBE Index’s 2016 programming language of the year award for its increased interest. “The main drivers behind Go’s success are its ease of learning and pragmatic nature. It is not about theoretical concepts such as virtual inheritance and nomads, but about hands-on experience. Apart from that, Go has built-in support for concurrency programming. More and more customers of our company TIOBE are adopting Go in an industrial setting. That is a good indicator,” TIOBE wrote at the time.
According to the report, users use Go to write command-line programs, API or RPC services, and web services, as well as use it for its simplicity, ease of use, concurrency features and performance. However, survey respondents did note that the language’s generics, package versioning and dependency management features needed to be improved as well as the understanding or educational resources available for Go. If the team improves upon these features, more developers said they would use Go for existing projects they have written in a different language.
“We appreciate the feedback given to identify these challenges faced by our users and community. In 2017 we are focusing on addressing these issues and hope to make as many significant improvements as we can. We welcome suggestions and contributions from the community in making these challenges into strengths for Go,” Francia wrote.
Other findings included: developers work with Go on Linux, MacOS and Windows; and their preferred code editors are Vim, VS Code, Atom and IntelliJ.
In addition, 55% of respondents expressed interest in contributing to Go, but only a few felt the contribution process was clear. The team surveyed 3,595 programmers in December of 2016.
