Obviously, Go is modern and is in many ways better than today's Java 1.7. But I am trying to illustrate its maturity level and the trajectory that I believe it's on. If you recall the days of Java 1.1, it was already seeing a great deal of early traction. The early traction of Go seems roughly the same to me. Also Java in its 1.1/1.2 years was on a clear trajectory to become a dominant language. I think Go will only grow in popularity for years to come in the same fashion. Even as a primarily Java developer, I look forward to Go being a clear and viable alternative.
I could be wrong about the trajectory, of course.
But I believe a short answer to your question is: if you're considering it, take some time to actually do something with Go. At first something experimental, then something for production use.
As a long-time JVM user, I've been trying to explain to other developers for a while now that assuming you use a modern approach to Java development, the performance of the JVM allows you to be (in my opinion) even more efficient than a dynamic language because you can code your application fairly recklessly. You can defer optimization in all of its forms for a long time, perhaps infinitely. The resulting mindset is a dramatically reduced concern about performance. When I work with most dynamic languages, I can never fully set aside the inner voice saying, "this is going to perform like crap." Trouble is, the voice is often right.
Go brings the same ballpark of performance as the JVM and a style that I believe is more appealing to Python developers than a modern Java stack (although I don't think modern Java stacks are given much of a fair shake because of Java's legacy, but that's a separate rant entirely).
Will they ever add generics? Not sure. Will Java ever have proper first-class functions? Not sure.
I simply used it as an example of something that many would point to as evidence of Go's maturity level. If the language maintainers don't ever add generics to Go, I think I'd be comfortable with that. And if that's the way it plays out, eventually the design decision will be seen as firm and not a sign of immaturity.
But you have to be mature enough to jump over the shadow of your functional pride and write clean imperative code.
By that reasoning we can go back to assembly ;): you just have to be mature enough to jump over the shadow of your portability pride and write clean assembly code.
Abstractions exist to help us and in that respect Go feels like a throwback to the past. It's pretty much a Java 1.0 that compiles to machine code.
Maps are in principle trivial to parallelise. That would be a nice feature.
http://blog.repustate.com/migrating-code-from-python-to-gola...
I love using Go and I'm a Python guy through & through.
Now would be a good time. No language, runtime, compiler, library, or framework is ever going to be perfect, but now is a great time to dive in.
> It still seems bleeding edge
This is probably a good thing in many respects because Go doesn't have the baggage from yore, and it was created by some pretty smart and capable people.
> but the language seems to have developed far faster than Python did over the last decade or so
Language designers are getting better at marketing. No language succeeds without fantastic marketing.
As was Javascript plus Node.js two years ago, Ruby and RoR five years ago, etc.
You'd think that more reasons are required than 'it is new, doesn't have baggage in was created by smart people'.