I know there’s a lot of curiosity regarding Go’s growth and usage, and some people often ponder about whether they should invest on it since they don’t see hundreds of jobs in public sites, so would like to point something obvious, but which people often don’t realize:
You are responsible for the market.
If you appreciate programming in Go, and understand the qualities of the language and the principles that the core team behind its development follow, it’s in your hands to make the language well known or not.
This can be as simple as blogging about it, or telling your coworkers or programmer friends about it, or maybe talking in user groups and conferences, running coding contests, etc. The core idea in all of that is making sure the right people are exposed to the language.
Note that this is not some kind of evil plan. We all like hearing about nice tools, and I would personally be glad to hear about other tools and languages people have to expose as well. The real point is just that we’re the ones building the future marketplace right now, and if we want Go to have a significant chunk of that marketplace because we like using it for our daily tasks, we better talk about why that is so.
It’s not about convincing.. it’s about exposing and explaining. People will have gone through similar pain as you have and will correlate to your experience, and then they can easily decide by themselves if Go is in a position to offer them a less painful life.
Check out Paul Graham’s “The Python Paradox”: http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html
It’s not so much about Python but that you can get better better programmers for a non mainstream language, because those are the people who really care about software development.