Lambda the Ultimate

LtU will be taken offline for some time tomorrow (Tuesday 9th) due to a data center move. The downtime could range from a few minutes to a few hours. The exact time this will occur is unknown, but you'll be able to tell because LtU will be unreachable. :-)

Go is a new programming language to come out of google and this thread on Google discouraging python internally for new projects seems more than just coincidence.

Go is an attempt to combine the ease of programming of an interpreted, dynamically typed language with the efficiency and safety of a statically typed, compiled language.

By combining dynamic features, safety, garbage collection and efficiency in a single language and environment, Go claims to remove the reasons why programmers end up building systems using multiple languages. A brief look at Go shows strong C origins with nice support for "goroutines" - essential sequential processes communicating using channels. I don't quite get the "safety" claim of the language since you can take the address of an uninitialized variable in Go. It could qualify as a "C with concurrency" language I think.

Go already has a great set of packages that should make it immediately usable as a pragmatic language. (The terse package names are very reminiscent of Erlang's package structure.) It even has a package for interfacing with Google Native Client (NaCl) for audio/video access.

(minor edits)