Lessons in Language Design from Go (a series)

This is the beginning of a series of blog posts about programming language design, with a focus on Go.

I've been using Go for about 7 years now, so I have personal experiences on which to base my opinions. I've also used a bunch of other languages in that time. I'd like to try to compare the design choices embedded in those languages, especially thinking about how those choices affect day-to-day usage and the long-term evolution of a language "ecosystem."

A lot of wonderful people create Go, and a lot more wonderful people use Go every day, building some very useful things. For example, the world of Docker and orchestration that underlies most of the Internet right now would not exist without it! Go was developed to fill a need, and its growth and popularity since that time show that it is a valuable piece of the software world right now.

So, I hope that I can draw some lessons that might inform future language development without doing any harm to that community.