
### **Exploring Go**

In the vast sea of programming languages available, Go has seemed to stick out prominently a lot more than some other languages. Slightly due to it being sponsored by one of the largest tech companies in the world, Go has become a staple in the software engineering world due to so much of the features it offers.

About a year or so ago, I was looking to pick up a new language, just to improve my professional development and have some cool projects on my resume. Rust was (and still is) one of the hottest languages always topping the Stack Overflow developer favourites (even surpassing Python!), however, one glimpse at it's syntax was enough to turn me away for the rest of my professional career. So I settled on the next best thing, Go. It's marketed by Google as having close-to-C performance, developer friendly, and a great standard library, and most importantly, didn't require manual memory management (yay gc!). I was sold. But like Rust, I wasn't too happy with the syntax, maybe I've just been spoiled too much by writing exclusively Python and JavaScript over the past few years, and as a result, any other syntax just felt weird to me. So I put it off for another month or two.

The opportunity arose when I had to implement a high-performance service at work, and JavaScript or Python weren't going to scale as well as we wanted, so I decided to give Go a try, and boy was I surprised. The syntax was still weird, but I was able to get used to it. I mean, why would I write an array of string like this???

```go
var arr = []string{"hello", "world"}
```

instead of

```typescript
const arr: string[] = ["hello", "world"];
```

Nevertheless, my experience was a great one. I was able to build a service that was able to handle roughly 10x of the traffic the JavaScript/Python versions were able to handle, whilst using about the same, or even fewer amounts of resources.

Recently, I started building my own stack-based programming language Gorth (heavily inspired by Forth, and Porth), in Go. It's a simple interpreted language that I'm using as an opportunity to teach myself more Go. There's definitely a long lifespan ahead of the language, and I'm excited to hop on the bandwagon to officially become a Gopher! Bye-bye Python, hello Go!


I've fallen in love with Go, bye bye Python