Comment by lvl155
1 day ago
I think a lot of people got on the Go train because of Google and not necessarily because it was good. There was a big adoption in Chinese tech scene for example. I personally think Rust/Go/Zig and other modern languages suffer a bit from trying too hard not to be C/C++/Java.
Go was a breath of fresh air and pretty usable right from the start. It felt like a neat little language with - finally - a modern standard library. Fifteen years ago, that was a welcome change. I think it's no surprise that Go and Node.js both got started and took off around the same time. People were looking something modern, lightweight, and simple and both projects delivered that.