Starting to Learn Go

Posted on: 2025-03-25

Stepping back from this single blog post, we can see a huge shift in programming languages. I started blogging in 2011, and my focus was mainly on web development using C# (.Net framework) and JavaScript.

My programming language interest was tightly coupled to my day-to-day programming language. While I had coded in Visual Basic, PHP, and Action Script, in 2011, the job market (Job market in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in 2011) was all about .Net. Around 2014, I moved in the United States and started working more and more frontend my interest shifted toward TypeScript. Slowly, my writing was about TypeScript which at the time was novel and even controversial in the JavaScript community. Once I started my master's degree in machine learning, in 2018, we used Python. At this time, I never dive full head down and very few of my interests in writing were in Python. In 2022, and for about 8 months, I had an interest and a couple of repositories for the programming language Rust. The language was getting traction but I never reached a point where I was productive like in TypeScript or C#. The strict language was more appealing than Python and the raw performance was interesting. However, the low velocity of shipping results made me wander away. In 2023, my Rust activity faded in favor of TypeScript. Until September 2024 I was interested to learn more about Python but also about how to create a Discord bot. I had a blast but also found that I need many tools around Python (linters, mypy, etc) to have a code base somewhat reliable and maintainable. Starting in March 2025, I am learning Go! I had no interest in Go before as it does not seem to be mainstream. However, I was still looking for a backend language that is performant without the heaviness of Java or .Net.

I will write many articles in the future as I learn the language. So far, I have had one week of trying it out, and I already have a REST API running with business logic (see Stock Game). The language is simple and easy to learn, and it offers many features without being too bloated. Maybe it is only a first impression; let's see it in a few weeks.