I personally recommend choosing the language after you know the personal project you'll be working on. For instance, I hate Go's lack of expressiveness but ended up choosing it for a personal project due to the strength of its crypto libraries. Also, if you can spare the time, creating full blown, open projects in languages can help your well-roundedness. My comment was meant to be less about Go and more about dismissing languages outright. I'm hoping the next post is about how awesome Crystal is sans unfamiliarity of other options.