Go developer articles and talks under go.dev provide an exceptional resource for learning about the Go programming language, its history, structure, and current challenges. To dive deeper into Go, here are a few noteworthy articles and talks:

• Rob Pike, 2012. Go at Google: Language Design in the Service of Software Engineering. Before Go, Google’s programming environment was mostly C++, Java, and Python. Go was designed to relieve pain points observed when using other languages, as listed in the article: slow builds, uncontrolled dependencies, each programmer using a different subset of the language, poor program understanding (code hard to read and poorly documented), duplication of effort, cost of updates, version skew, difficulty of writing automatic tools, and difficulty of cross-language builds.

• Andrew Gerrand, 2015. How Go Was Made. Slides from GopherCon 2015. There is also a recording of the presentation:

• Russ Cox, 2016. Codebase Refactoring (with help from Go). Reviews difficulties in working with large codebases and options for automated code refactoring.

Background Reading #

Students preparing for a deep-dive into Go can begin with this intermediate-level textbook.

Donovan, Alan A. A., and Brian W. Kernighan. 2016. The Go Programming Language. New York: Addison-Wesley. [ISBN-13: 978-0-13-419044-0]

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