A funny thing about human beings is that once they’re out of their young adult years they tend to like things the way they’ve always been. In the tech world, that often takes the form of preferring the text editor and languages you’ve always used. Even those of us who take the plunge and, say, switch between Vim, Emacs, or VS Code don’t want to give up our programming languages.
I’ve been a C user for most of my career and although these new-fangled languages, like Rust or Julia, are intellectually interesting, most of us have no urge to change. The languages that do have a chance of seducing us away from our go-to languages are those that represent a limited extension to the one we’re attached to. For C, until recently, that would have been C++ but many C programmers found C++ too baroque and full of bad ideas to be a real successor to the crown.
Fredrik Holmqvist has a different candidate for the successor to C: Go. C++ grew out of Bell Labs so it seems a natural choice but as I said, many of us don’t like the language. As I’ve written before, C++ does away what’s good about C and introduces things that are demonstrably worse. Go, on the other hand, comes out of Google so its provenance is already suspect. The thing is, though, it was designed by folks with the same sensibilities and taste that gave us C. Dennis Ritchie is no longer with us but Ken Thompson and Rob Pike, who were early C users, influenced its development, and shared those sensibilities, are and, more to the point, are principal developers of Go.
Holmqvist makes a strong case for giving Go a chance. If you’re a programmer who grew up with C, you might want to give it a try.