#123-Exploring the Go Programming Language

A lot of programming languages surface and go into oblivion every year. Go is not one of them. Go is here to stay. Mgtheboss.blogspot.com got 2,724 requests from its readers through various channels to explore the language. Go was on its radar for a long time. Many of the developers who work in corporations associated with mgtheboss.blogspot.com shared a very positive outlook about the language which acted as the final green signal for the exploration. 

You can download go from the official site download page. You will find the packages for linux, mac, & windows along with the source there. You will probably need to download the amd64 version if you are on a 64 bit operating system and the 386 version if you are on a 32 bit operating system. If you are running windows 7 without any service pack, please download version 1.2.2. When the download is done, please go to your downloads folder and install go. During installation using the msi installer on windows, the c:\Go\bin directory will automatically be added to your PATH environment variable, assuming the installation directory is c:\Go . In the case of the zip package, you will need to do it manually through control panel. Please restart the command prompt to complete the installation. If later you find out that you are unable to run go commands, you might need to restart windows.

Please create a file named welcome.go in a folder. In that file copy-paste the code from exploring-the-go-programming-language.go. Save the file. Start a command prompt from the folder. To build the program with the go tool, run the command, go build welcome.go. After the command gets executed successfully, you will see a file named welcome.exe in the folder. You can run it by running the command, welcome. You will see the output, Welcome to go.

If you are interested a quick tour of the go language, please visit, tour.golang.org. On the tour site, you will be able to try out the language. It is a great place to learn the basic and advanced concepts of the language. If you are a seasoned developer, it should not take you more than 3 hours to finish the tour. Go has a few similarities with languages such as c or java but also some differences that make it a very unique language. For instance, the main part of the code in a go program resides in a main function like c or java but, in go there is only for loop and no while or do while loop.

A go function can return more than one value. Go also supports named return values. An interesting point about go is in variable declarations or function argument lists, the type is mentioned last. Go is meant to be “easy to [sic]read by other developers.” In go, if you import a package such as, math, and do not use it, the build fails. “Go assignment between items of different type requires an explicit conversion.”

Go is a very undemanding language. It will not take a lot of time for a new developer to write a go program to calculate the square root of a complex no. First, you need to import the packages, fmt & math/cmplx. In main(), you can calculate the square root of a complex no. with the help of the function, cmplx.Sqrt. In the end, you might consider using a format string, also known as, verb, such as, “%.2f” to print the result.

Go is in great demand. Liam Tung shares the findings of a survey, “32% of experienced developers pick Go as the programming language they want to learn, well ahead of Python, which 24% say they want to learn.” He adds, “The Go project's 2019 survey found that most developers are using the language for web development, followed by database development, network programming, systems programming, and DevOps. Microsoft's Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is the most widely used code editor among Go developers.” Many prominent projects use go. The docker project helps “developers package software into standardized units for development, shipment and deployment”. Docker is said to have “democratized containerization”. Docker uses go. Istio & hugo also use go. When are you planning to use go?