GO: The Google Programming Language

On Tuesday, 11 Nov 2009, Google released “GO”, a programming language that aims to be fast, productive, and most importantly, fun in an announcement on the Google’s Open Source blog.

True to Google’s style,  the logos are simple also:

According to the blog:

“Go combines the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++. Typical builds feel instantaneous; even large binaries compile in just a few seconds. And the compiled code runs close to the speed of C. Go lets you move fast.”

Motivations

On more serious note, looking around the new website, Google explained that its motivations for the new language is attributed to the fact that:

No major systems language has emerged in over a decade, but over that time the computing landscape has changed tremendously… We believe it’s worth trying again with a new language, a concurrent, garbage-collected language with fast compilation…

Surprising?

I don’t think that Google’s move t0 introduce a programming language to be  surprising at all.  The company has been moving slowly into other fields of the web, including (but not limited to) building a browser, building the Chrome OS as well as the Android system for cellphones. It is of no surprise that they would go into the core of everything and announce a new programming language as well.

Interested in learning?

As with most of its recent  product launches, the company has released a 1 hour Tech Talk video as well as its corresponding PDF, in addition to the usual online documentation to help developers get started…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKnDgT73v8s[/youtube]

The future?

It will be interesting to see how this language will take off. Google’s developer targeted products are usually quite well received. With the focus on quick/fast and simple development coupled with some familiarity (due to its roots in C and python), it may be a recipe for success of this new language.