Go is an open-source, higher-level language developed at Google and first released in 2012. It’s in the top 20 most popular languages in the RedMonk and TIOBE Index rankings.

With Go, you get:

A standard library

Package management

Static typing

Support for testing

Platform independence

If I were creating Educative from scratch today, I would love to work with Go. Given my background in C/C++, it would have been easier to transition to the static typing of Go than to learn Python. But Go wasn’t as mature back then as it is today. More importantly, Google Cloud and the Google App Engine didn’t support Go when we started building Educative. They supported Java and Python, and we chose Python for its combination of functionality and ease of learning.

However, I don’t recommend Go simply because I like statically typed languages. Let’s drill deeper into its many useful attributes.