Perl to Go
I started using perl back in 1996, around version 5.003, while working at UBC in Vancover. We were working on a student management system at the time, written in C, interfacing to an Oracle database. We started experimenting with this Common Gateway Interface thing (CGI) that had recently appeared, and let you write interactive applications on the web (!). perl was the tool of choice for CGI, and we were able to talk to Oracle using a perl module that spoke Oracle Call Interface (OCI).
That project turned out to be pretty successful, and I've been developing in perl ever since. Perl has a reputation for being obscure and abstruse, but I find it a lovely language - powerful and expressive. Yes it's probably too easy to write bad/unreadable perl, but it's also straightforward to write elegant, readable perl. I routinely pick up code I wrote 5 years ago and have no problems reading it again.
That said, perl is showing its age in places, and over the last few years I've also been using other languages where different project requirements made that make sense. I've written significant code in C, Java, python, ruby, and javascript/nodejs, but for me none of them were sufficiently attractive to threaten perl as my language of choice.
About a year ago I started playing with Go at $dayjob, partly interested in the performance gains of a compiled language, and partly to try out the concurrency features I'd heard about. Learning a new language is always challenging, but Go's small footprint, consistency, and well-written libraries really made picking it up pretty straightforward.
And for me the killer feature is this: Go is the only language besides perl in which I regularly find myself writing a good chunk of code, getting it syntactically correct, and then testing it and finding that it Just Works, first time. The friction between thinking and coding seems low enough (at least the way my brain works) that I can formulate what I'm thinking with a pretty high chance of getting it right. I still get surprised when it happens, but it's great when it does!
Other things help too - it's crazy fast, especially coming from mostly interpreted languages recently; the concurrency stuff really is nice, and let's you think about concurrent flows pretty intuitively; and lots of the the language decisions like formatting, tooling, and composition just seem to sit pretty well with me.
So while I'm still very happy writing perl, especially for less performance-intensive applications, I'm now a happy little Go developer as well, and enjoying exploring some more advanced corners of a new language home.
Yay Go!
If you're interested in learning Go, the online docs are pretty great: start with the Tour of Go and How to write Go code, and then read Effective Go.
If you're after a book-length treatment, the standard text is The Go Programming Language by Donovan and Kernighan. It's excellent but pretty dense, more textbook than tutorial.
I've also read Go in Practice, which is more accessible and cookbook-style. I thought it was okay, and learnt a few things, but I wouldn't go out of your way for it.
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