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Comment by mhd | Hacker News Reader

Not for the common definition of "system programming language", as e.g. offered by John Ousterhout, author of the aforementioned Tcl (http://www.tcl.tk/doc/scripting.html)

(Never mind that "web language" ain't exactly a great term, either. I'd apply that to some integrated language like Opa, but most languages commonly used for web programming aren't restricted to that and do enjoy some common use outside of that area.)

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So can you tell me, what kind of tasks are best solved and evaluated in go? Is it a low level lamguage like c, or does it find best use in javascript like domain? Or is it like java/c#?

From a use case perspective, I'd put it in the Java camp. Can do low level, although probably not the best choice for really down-to-the-metal stuff (if you really need all the optimization you can get and don't want to deal with GC). Due to its pretty decent library support and compilation speed/build system, it's also a bit more suited to application where you might reach for a scripting language, as turnaround doesn't suffer too much. There's also a pretty strong concurrency support, using the CSP approach.

So no really narrow sweet spot. A good language for general network programming, which might include some framework web stuff, but also could involve writing your own custom servers and consumers.

There's probably a better language for each individual task, but go is quite solid at a wide spectrum of tasks. Good community, too, if a bit fanboyish.

but still, i could go some degree low level, right?

Sure. It has signed and unsigned numeric types with specified sizes, and the "unsafe" module provides some alignment and even pointer arithmetic capabilities if you really need to tell the computer everything.

I'd just except the very end of low level stuff from it, mostly due to maturity and GC issues, so it wouldn't be my choice of language for a embedded real-time situation. If you're talking web server/3D game low-level, it's fine.

To me, go looks like C programmers copied Modula-3, whereas Java was Cobol programmers copying Modula-3...

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