Documenting my personal journey of learning Go.

• About me
• Why Go?
  • Resources
• How to Start
  • 1. Introducing the language
  • 2. Trying it out
    • Setting up development environment

I think sharing context about me and my background in development is important for framing the approach I took and correlating to what worked well and what didn't work as well. While I hope that sharing these resources would help others looking to get started with Go, everyone's coming from different positions, and what worked for me certainly won't work for everyone.

• White, abled-bodied, cisgender woman from middle-class, suburban, American family
• Started in basic web development (HTML/CSS) in junior high and high school
• Studied physics and computer science in college
• 4 years of professional experience focused on full stack web development primarily in TypeScript and Elixir, with significant exposure to Ruby and Python

I've been interested in learning Go for a while now after hearing it's more accessible than other low-level procedural programming languages like C and C++ while still generally packing more performance than some higher-level languages like Python or Ruby. It's also exciting to me as a more modern language than some of those others.

Lastly, I found so much to love about Elixir, and Go aims to fit a similar set of needs to Elixir, but having made slightly different decisions about its design. With my limited initial understanding of Go, I see two main (practical) differences to working with Elixir vs. working with Go:

• Elixir is dynamically-typed (technically it's "strongly-typed", but I found the compiler type system via Dialyzer to be slow, difficult to understand and trace, and unreliable), whereas Go is statically-typed
• While both languages are multi-paradigm but favoring more of a functional programming style, Elixir has stronger functional programming principals baked into it, whereas Go is more object-based: there are no classes or inheritance like in traditional object-oriented programming, and functions are defined outside of types, but Go also intentionally omits map, reduce, and filter functions from their standard library, preferring more explicit for loops

• https://hackernoon.com/should-i-go-the-pros-and-cons-of-using-go-programming-language-8c1daf711e46
• https://www.cloudbees.com/blog/comparing-elixir-go/
• https://flaviocopes.com/golang-is-go-object-oriented/

Since Go is not my first language, I wanted to start with something that would help not just introduce the language but introduce how general programming concepts and patterns can be applied to Go compared to other languages -- how to write things in Go effectively. To that end, I started by reading Go's own document, Effective Go, which "gives tips for writing clear, idiomatic Go code" and is described as "a must read for any new Go programmer".

Next up, I wanted to start getting a feel for actually working with the language to figure out which things I could intuit and which I would need to read or watch more about first.

I use asdf for managing my language versions and other command line tools, so I started by setting up asdf-golang:

$ asdf version
v0.8.0
$ asdf plugin-add golang https://github.com/kennyp/asdf-golang.git
$ asdf list-all golang
...
1.16.2
1.16.3
$ asdf install golang 1.16.3
$ asdf global golang 1.16.3
$ asdf current golang
golang          1.16.3          /Users/kelli/.tool-versions
$ go version
go version go1.16.3 darwin/amd64

Next comes using VSCode to write Go:

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/go