I have a background in data science, so have a lot of experience with Python. I’d always wanted to do more backend stuff: push my models in productions, do the ETL work myself... But quickly got frustrated with Python.
Go and Erlang have solved a lot of my pain points. Erlang is a bit of a strange beast for people who come from procedural languages, but it allowed me to build ETL pipelines that are more robust than anything I could do with Python in less than half the number of lines. Even for heavy computations, I now find myself spinning Python nodes to do the heavy lifting with Pytorch and co, and doing all the orchestration with Erlang. It also made me a way better programmer.
I use Go for computation-heavy APIs that don’t require a lot of data massaging. It’s a very efficient, weirdly comforting (!) language.
Now I think I got the bug, I really want to learn Clojure and Nim this year :)