History of Go as a programming language
Go (or Golang, short for Google Language) was developed in 2007 and released in 2009 as an open-source programming language. It was designed to overcome the complexity of modern server-side languages such as C, C++, and Java. The developers who created it felt that server-side languages hadn’t evolved enough since its inception.
It is also worth mentioning that Go was created by Google developers (Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson), who are now supported. With one of the largest companies in the world behind you, language is not going anywhere anytime soon. The widespread introduction of multiprocessing gave them the idea of creating a modern backend language that can effectively use multiprocessing and solve complex cloud computing problems. The language is also used by major companies such as Dropbox, Soundcloud, Docker, and the BBC.
Then Google was actively developing, including the increase in the amount of code used to manage the infrastructure. As a result, the work of the programs constantly became slower, and it became more and more difficult to maintain their code. Therefore, cloud engineers at Google concluded that it is easier to develop a new programming language and port all legacy to it than to optimize all the code constantly. Plus, this would make it possible to have a language with the performance of C, but at the same time, it is easy to write code.
One of the creators of Go, developer Rob Pike, said that the new programming language should be similar to C, C ++, or Java – so that developers do not have to relearn much. But at the same time, it must be simpler, faster, and more efficient – because Google employees are primarily engineers, not scientists who can spend hundreds of hours studying technology.
What is Go used for
Go was originally designed for networking and infrastructure applications to replace popuinitiallyrformance server-side languages such as Java and C++. Today, Go is used as a backend language for a huge number of different areas of development:
- Cloud and server applications, web services
- A’vasts and process automation
- Command Line Applications
- Artificial intelligence and big data
- Programming of microcontrollers and robotics
However, Go is best revealed as a programming language for working with infrastructure. The most popular tools in this area are explicitly written in Go – Kubernetes, Docker, and Prometheus.
Advantages of Go
Simplicity of language
Go is easy to learn and understand the basic concepts. There is a famous tale that Go’s entire specification and documentation can be read without problems in half a day. Developers who choose Go as their second language confirm that it is easier to learn than other technologies.
Syntax-wise, Go is in the C-like group, like many other programming languages, so it’s easy to switch to and learn. That is, the developer wrote in PHP all his life, and then he just took it and switched to Go. And he began to write code thousands of times more productive than the previous one.
High Performance Applications
Go is very productive: it’s easy to write high-performance applications on it. It was designed to automate processes on a large scale, so it can be used to create systems with high performance and load.
In addition, Go works great with infrastructure and cloud platforms. It is used as the primary language by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Community and salaries
Go has a very vibrant and active developer community as it is an open-source project. They independently contribute to it, create new modules and libraries, and help beginners master the language. Despite its open source history, Go is actively maintained by Google, so the language is rapidly evolving and changing.
About salaries: Go-developers have the second salary in the IT market in the USA, which exceeds $140,000 per year. However, it is worth noting that such a skew in the wages of Go-developers in the US market may be because most of them work at Google, where programmers traditionally receive a large salary.
According to a 2021 Stack Overflow survey, Go developers earn an average of $75,000 per year globally, making it the eighth most profitable language in existence. That’s more than Python developers ($59K/year), JS developers ($54K/year), Java developers ($51K/year), and PHP developers ($38K/year). Probably, such a salary is related to the experience of Go-developers. It is rarely entered by juniors and is practically not taught as a first programming language.
Great for working with microservices
Go is a compiled language, but the process takes less than a second. Even large projects are assembled in a matter of seconds – for compiled languages. This is an excellent speed.
The entire project and the entire codebase are collected into one binary file
This means you can write one code, which can then be easily compiled for any platform and processor architecture – under Windows or Linux. This is often used in DevOps when writing and collecting scripts for each hardware. And this is done in just one line.
Go was initially designed for heavy workloads – in this case, it means the number of parallel tasks being performed. For the program to work in parallel, you must write asynchronous code that will serve several actions simultaneously. Go implements the concept of Green Threads for this in the form of goroutines. And it happened that writing asynchronous code in Go is not difficult, while it works efficiently and maximizes the use of all hardware resources, including the processor core.
Parallelism
Parallelism is essentially breaking up an extensive application into smaller programs that run at the same time. This means that Go can run a thousand mini-programs within a monolithic program while maintaining an impressive speed and handling many requests at any given time.
Difference between Go, HTML, CSS, and JS
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and CSS (Cascade StyleSheets) are the building blocks of websites. They are the basis of web development, and not a single site can do without them. But they are not quite programming languages.
They are needed to create the content of the web page – content and design; you can’t write a program on them. Nevertheless, web technologies are now being used in other areas, including when creating desktop and even mobile applications, so these “languages” have good prospects.
HTML is a markup language that defines the structure of a web page using tags. Tags indicate to the browser how to display content: “this is a title,” “this is a paragraph,” “this is a picture,” and “this is a link.”
CSS — cascading style sheets that describe the appearance of a page: font, background, color, visibility of elements, and much more. Several styles can be applied to each part of the page, and cascading determines the order of using styles to the component — for example, first increase the font size, then make the text italic, and finally paint it blue.
HTML – web page skeleton, CSS – responsible for appearance.
HTML and CSS are elementary – you can figure out the basics in just a couple of days, even on your own. So if you are afraid of programming and do not believe you will succeed, try to start with them. Everyone can do this; it will help you smoothly enter programming and evaluate your strengths. And then, if desired, you can switch to other languages. HTML and CSS are front-end languages.
JavaScript is everywhere now. It is one of the fastest-growing languages of our time and is gaining popularity quickly. JavaScript is multifunctional; on it, you can develop programs for any platform.
Initially, it was used to create interactive web pages, but now it is used for servers, mobile, desktop applications, and much more.
However, despite its widespread use, JavaScript is not a magic bullet. It has its limitations, due to which it is not suitable for all tasks.
JavaScript is a monopoly language in frontend development. With its help, programmers enliven pages by adding dynamic content: the background changes with a click of the mouse, new content is loaded when scrolling down, data in forms are checked when buying tickets, and notifications pop up on social networks. JavaScript is frontend and backend language at the same time.
Pros of JavaScript are:
- Suitable for client and server-side
- Huge amount of libraries
- Low entrance threshold
- Popularity
Cons of JavaScript are:
- Weak typing that allows you to concatenate a string with a number
- Confused syntax
In 2009, Google created the Go language to replace C++ and Java in developing the backend of web applications and network services. The developers have kept the speed of the “pluses” and made the syntax more expressive and concise: there are only 25 keywords in the language.
The main feature of Golang is multithreading. On Go, you can cheaply (only for a few kilobytes of memory) and quickly run independent functions – goroutines – and not be afraid of a lack of memory. Docker and Kubernetes were written in Go.
Go has a low risk of errors and automatic memory cleanup and code documentation but cannot manage memory and has no ternary operators.
The giant Google supports the language, which is a great advantage.
What are suitable for Go, HTML, CSS, and JS
Go
There are more and more Golang programmers every year. About 1.1 million developers around the world use Go as their primary language. Another 2.7 use it as a complement to another language. The increased number of vacancies also speaks of the demand for the language. Go is used by web agencies, outsourced developers, and businesses. The language is increasingly used by well-known IT corporations that have decided to rewrite their own code.
Large companies use Go – SAP, IBM, Google, Walmart, Dell, Intel, HP, RedHat, Microsoft, Adobe, BBC, Uber, Dropbox, Netflix, and Twitter.
Go is a simple language, but it allows you to do very complex things. You can quickly write a highly loaded, multi-threaded, cross-platform application. The main scope of the language is network software, utilities, and the backend.
HTML
All web pages on the Internet have been created using some form of HTML. This is essential for browsers to learn how to display texts or load various elements. Html is a programming language that can be quickly learned and is very convenient. It is also platform-independent. Html makes it easy to add video, images, and audio content to a web page. The language can also be used to add hypertext content to text sections.
HTML is easy to learn and use; most developers consider HTML to be one of the easiest programming languages to learn. Many developers have learned HTML before any other language, which is now integral to any development curriculum. HTML is easy to learn as it uses simple tags, and there are no case-sensitive issues.
HTML is a free language, and developers don’t need to buy software to start. The language does not require users to work with external plugins and software to access key features. Many companies worldwide use HTML to fulfill their website design requirements. You can create entire websites in HTML format.
The language is supported by the most widely used browsers. Hence, if the website is written in HTML, there are no issues related to browser support. HTML sites can be optimized for the various browsers from which they can be loaded.
CSS
CSS is a programming language used to describe how documents should look in terms of layout and style. A document is usually a text file structure using a markup language.
CSS is used to transform a document into a human-readable form. This is especially important for browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, which are designed to display documents visually on screens, printers, and projectors.
CSS selectors are tools that allow users to select and manipulate various elements on a web page. They can be called structural components to match attributes and attribute values. The new selectors can target pseudo-classes to style elements that target a URL. The selectors also include a checked pseudo-class for styling checkbox elements, including various radio buttons and checkboxes.
CSS can be used to make various changes, text effects, and stylings, such as changing text alignment, document breaks, and hyphen styling. The language has properties that help adjust whitespace between characters for more significant visual impact and capitalize letters at the beginning of paragraphs.
CSS saves time because CSS code is written once, and the same code can be used on multiple HTML pages. A style can be defined for each HTML element, and the user can apply it to various web pages depending on the requirements. The CSS code is easy to maintain, and users can easily make global changes to edit the style. After changes are made, all web pages are automatically updated.
JS
JavaScript is a popular programming language that allows users to implement complex functionality on web pages. It can be triggered any time a page performs a dynamic action, such as showing periodic content updates, animated 2D and 3D graphics, interactive maps, video embeds, and more.
JavaScript is an object-oriented language and has concepts built around the idea of objects. Object-oriented languages are widely used for features such as polymorphism, whereby an object can take on different forms.
JavaScript is a client-side language that can dynamically reduce server requirements. Some applications may not require a server at all to run.
A web browser can be called a client, which the user uses. The data is uploaded to the server by the client, and after its visualization, the user gets access to it. The user may use a client or browser to view websites and interact with websites. User input validation, also known as form validation, allows users to initiate customer interaction by filling out a form on a web page. The client must verify the form data to validate the information provided by the user.
JavaScript can be used to develop features like drag-and-drop sliders. This can drastically improve the user interface and user experience on the site. The developers can extend the functionality of a web page by creating JavaScript snippets for many third-party add-ons.
Conclusion
All of the programming languages mentioned above languages deserve the attention of developers. You can explore their features, advantages, and disadvantages to choose the best one for your specific programming needs. Selecting the correct language will help you achieve perfect development results and provide a quality user experience.
