Go will make you a better programmer

The last line of Dave Cheny’s Gophercon 2015 India keynote is the best: “Go will make you a better programmer.”

It’s true. When I am programming Go, I never think, “OK, is this an OK shortcut to take here? Is this a play context? Is this a work context, but I can push off bounds checking on some other layer? Is this just a little local server, and I don’t care about hackers?”

These questions don’t exist, because the way Go and its standard library and its idioms work together, the right way — the easy way! — to write it is simply, clearly, and securely.

Go makes me a better programmer.

And it makes me increasingly intolerant of C and Python. This week alone at work I struggled with a crashing router from a missing C bounds check and late- and strangely-failing Python code from dynamic typing. Idiomatic Go code does not have those two failure modes, and my patience for them is waning fast as a result.