I am sure a lot of you did have the question at some point:
Which language is better?
What programming/scripting language should I use?
maybe you compared them X vs Y pros and cons

There are a lot of articles out there, that try to tackle this. I do not like to compare two languages, because they can be very different in their core. The short answer to the above question is, It depends on the use-case, skill and motivations.

I did use PHP for a lot of years to create web applications. Is PHP a good choice? For starters, PHP is a scripting language, so generally, it is not a bad choice. Scripting languages are easy to learn and you have a pretty fast learning curve. You are able to get a feel of it in a short time period.

There is a big community out there, that uses PHP daily, you can find a lot of tutorials. There are a lot of ready-made frameworks to use. Simply said, it is painless to create products using PHP. Some of the most popular platforms available use PHP. To mention a few OSS, like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, phpBB and others.

I think this is also the issue in my opinion. After a couple years of using it and developing stuff, I got to a point, that I was constantly rewriting things. I was working on a project, started with one framework, then I saw something different, and I was starting to rewrite it. I was never satisfied with what I was working with and always found something new. Something more interesting.

This was going on for a long time by that time. I was never satisfied with the end result. It simply did not feel like it. I was frustrated, because I could not complete anything to the end, and I was always undecided.

At this point, I did found Go. I think someone did mention it to me, but I do not remember anymore. It was approximately 4 years ago. I’ve heard about this — for me unknown language — Go (or Golang). I’ve gone through the website and I must admit, I was not convinced at first.

A statically typed language, made by Google, advertised with catchphrases like this:

Go is an open source programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software.

My mind was blown, how can something be simple, reliable and also efficient at once. I had to try it and see what this was about. On the page they had some nice examples, also a playground where you could easily try your code. All of these were really fast and to my surprise, the code was understandable just by looking.

I mean, the syntax was also kind of familiar in places, but unknown in others. I’ve seen traces of C and maybe C++ in it and others syntax which I was not familiar with, but I knew I’ve seen it somewhere already.

After a few struggles and roadblocks, today I like Go very much. It turned out to be a good choice to move on from PHP.

No PHP processors anymore. Nothing needs to be set in the php.ini file. I just build a binary, which is less effort than all the dependencies that would be otherwise needed (for PHP: apache, php-fpm, some mysql drivers, etc. a lot of config tasks).

Go allows you to compile for any major platform, without the need to have that platform used for compilation. It builds you a small binary, that can be run with a high confidence. No more dependencies anymore!

Building software in statically typed languages like Go is of course not easy in comparison to a scripting language. You have to adhere to the high standards set by the compiler. No unused variables, no more mistaken assignments of strings to integer variables.

I think that the Go code is also more readable. If I’ve found any library or module for Go on Github, I had no issue understanding what the code does. I am not able to tell the same about a Java plugin for example. This makes working with Go also satisfying.

I just wanted to motivate you, if you are planning to learn something new and are undecided on what to choose, I think Go could be a good choice for you! A good choice, that you will not regret!