Is it worth it to study Golang and if so, how – experts answer
The Go programming language makes sense to learn for both novice professionals and developers with experience.
If you are a novice developer, then Go is perfect for starting:
- It has a simple and laconic syntax;
- strict and uniform rules for writing code;
- you don’t need to memorize hundreds of ingenious variations of writing the same code, but with shorter syntax.
In fact, in a fairly short time you get an industrial tool to implement your ideas. First of all, we are talking about the backend (the server side of the applications) – if this meets your needs, then be sure to try it.
If you are a programmer with experience, then you can study Go for at least two reasons:
- This language brings some concepts and approaches that allow us to more efficiently build both the development itself and work with competitiveness. This is due to the fact that the task of modern software is a large number of network operations, preferably in non-blocking mode (if we are talking about the backend). The concepts themselves are not new, for example, the idea of lightweight threads, which Go called goroutines, has been around for quite some time. These ideas are reflected in other languages (coroutines in Kotlin), so you should take a closer look at them.
- More and more companies are using Go to migrate from the so-called traditional languages to optimize their network applications, so you can learn from this experience and achieve lower costs, increased productivity, etc.
How and where to learn Go
The information becomes outdated quickly enough, so I recommend books only for the current year of release, or those that cover the basics of the language, as well as video tutorials. If you want to know how everything really happens, the best thing is live courses from practitioners. Yes, it will cost money, and courses vary in level of quality and coverage, but in a short period you will receive a concentrated extract of information and practical skills.
It’s worth starting with the basic things: the basics of syntax and a standard library, and then solving practical problems using the DBMS, the web, and everything else.
At the same time, Go has its advantages and disadvantages.
Benefits: simple syntax, rich standard library, performance, well-thought-out solutions in terms of competitiveness, deployment, testing.
disadvantages: sometimes there is not enough opportunity to write something shorter (“advanced constructions”), there are not enough opportunities in the language itself (generic’s), but they promise to add them.
Do not think that Go is a “killer of all languages”. Neither Java, nor C ++, nor other languages will disappear anywhere, but Go has its own niche: system applications, automation utilities, network services and a backend.
In the job market, in vacancies on Go quite often they write “a desire to study and switch to Go,” that is, there are not enough specialists and companies are ready to train them on their own.
Of the tasks in large companies, the most common is to transfer part of the services from another language to Go, in order to make processes faster / more productive / consume less iron. Therefore, the work will definitely be interesting, because optimization tasks force you to pump different skills: workload, monitoring, etc. In small and medium-sized companies, as I said, this is a backend.
