However if someone is coming from PHP, Go must look positively modern. Considering the millions of PHP programmers out there, Go can keep on growing for a long time.
Not to mention the fact that go fmt makes everyone’s code look exactly the same. No more weird, personal styles being brought into into source code or pointless discussions of naming conventions or indentation.
But what about static linking, fast compile times and awesome standard lib is like "stepping into the feature"?
Standard lib is just plain awesome. You can build most things right out of the box without searching the web for competing versions of the same thing. Web apps are a great example.
Fast compile times was a feature built into Go from the beginning. Presumably from people frustrated by compile times of large C/C++ codebases [1]. It’s about developer productivity.
1. https://golang.org/doc/faq#What_compiler_technology_is_used_...
Because they are invented at a time before storage and RAM is dirt cheap and lightning fast. It was painfully wasteful and slow to load a copy of the standard library for every process. Dynamic linking was invented basically because static linking wasn’t feasible.
Oh, and the IDE environment is amazing - you literally don't need much more than VSCode or vim (the language tools have built in refactoring support, formating, quick compile for syntax error, godoc).
And you have closures, something Java didn't have until 8, and even now many libraries don't support it.