From the research papers I usually read, plenty of others were quite productive with 60's and 70's languages, many of them more expressive than C.
So while Go is a good contribution to reduce the amount of written C per year, it is hardly a novelty, including its compile speed.
I’ve been programming for 30+ years and used many of the languages you’ve described. In fact I’ve written code professionally in well over a dozen different languages (I stopped counting somewhere in the last decade). Yet I still find myself productive in Go. It’s not just the compiler speed either. You talk as if people are idiots or are delusional when actually Go is quite a nice language for a great many people with real world problems to solve.
I’m sure I’ll get downvoted for saying this but there is so much snobbery and elitism in these kinds of threads and it’s absurd. Live and let live guys.
People aren't idiots, yet magpie programming is a reality.
I think you need to do some research into what “personal preference” actually means because you seem to think your own preference is gospel and everyone who disagrees is a magpie (which is just an indirect way of saying “idiot”). And frankly it’s getting tiresome watching you derail every software development thread.
If you find it tiresome. just don't bother replying and go read something else.
Pretty combative and low effort content. Snarky replies with little respect to others opinions. Always posting jabs at Go about how 90's languages are better in every way yada yada. Do mind the tendency to veer into offtopic too.
Given the effort, I sometimes wonder how painful it must be for this person to see others enjoying and being productive in the language.
And you might at least consider whether the person who's wrong on the Internet might in fact be you.
And you might consider whether, even if you're right, you're also being counterproductive in how you're going about trying to persuade others. When someone raises a valid point against something you say, you don't acknowledge the point. Instead, you find something - anything - that you can quibble with in what they said. This makes you look like someone who wants to win the argument at any cost, rather than someone who wants to have a reasonable conversation. This makes some of us wonder how biased your interpretation of events is. That is, your hyper-argumentativeness makes you less persuasive*, rather than more.
Go is productive in specific ways. Other languages are productive in other specific ways. That’s why we have different programming languages solving different problems.
So if someone says they like Go because they’re productive in it that doesn’t mean all other languages are shit. That only means Go solves the specific kind of problems they need solving.
This is why I hate languages flame wars and why commenters like the GP exasperate me. They have different problems they need solving and talk about programming languages like there is a one size fits all. That’s not the case.
What languages do you think people should be using instead? My use case is mostly backend network services. My next two choices would be Rust (absolutely love it but slows me down and async isn't ready) or Clojure (would rather avoid a VM). Would you suggest others?
Example, Go's compilation speed is nothing to wonder about, when one enjoyed languages like Modula-2 and Object Pascal compiling on 4 Mhz CPUs.
I've never been willing to make the religious commitment to truly get good at C++. It's insanely complicated.