What is novel about Go? It just seems like C repacked with a garbage collector and basic concurrent programming support to me. Which both weren't novel even when Go was designed.
It's just a little bit more work to write a non-trivial program in Go than in a scripting language such as Python, so if you need/want the good tooling and you need/want the significant speed improvement, it could be a good choice.
Go doesn’t have the libraries of python however. In certain computing domains you would first have to spend 10 years rewriting the python frameworks in golang before you could even be on parity with python.
I am most familiar with scientific computing and GIS applications — python is miles ahead of golang in ecosystem support in those domains.
For scripting and "just throwing something together for internal use," Python is a pretty traditional choice, but I think Go is able to outclass it for maintainability -- static typing and somewhat better package management are a big help, and Go has a comparable ecosystem.
And if this wasn't a useful argument many more people would use OCaml, Crystal, D, etc ; and every new language wouldn't be met with "I like it but it doesn't have the libraries I need so I'll keep writing Java".
Naive question, can't you just call Python code from Go? I don't see the problem besides that performance of the Python libs wouldn't be as good as if they were written in Go.
Go doesn't have any substantial innovations in the set of language features, or maybe none at all. I believe it is instead the whole of a sober and efficient toolchain that effects tedious but simple to understand and work with code, which gave it such a great appeal.
It's like a modernized C with a good implementation and out-of-the-box no-nonsense tooling, and the tricky bits left out. Nothing really new to see, but there was nothing really like it when it took off. Very utilitarian. Rust, Java, C#, C++ - those are all very 'complex' or 'bloated' in many different ways to an avid Go programmer.
I'm not promoting Go (I personally don't like it), I'm just trying to understand it's appeal and popularity and what is different about it. Quality and completeness of implementation, tooling, etc. by having a big company behind it also helps of lot of course - but it isn't sufficient.
