chwash2007

Indeed, these are the 2 best things in life.

A few moments of fun.

Nice visualization/learning tool for the trig functions.

A dead-on accurate talk about distractions at the office.

a very helpful collection of mathematics tutorials.

I got a good laugh.

With Google supporting it and luminaries such as Ken Thompson designing it it may gain serious traction.
......

What is the history of the project?

Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson started sketching the goals for a new language on the white board on September 21, 2007. Within a few days the goals had settled into a plan to do something and a fair idea of what it would be. Design continued part-time in parallel with unrelated work. By January 2008, Ken had started work on a compiler with which to explore ideas; it generated C code as its output. By mid-year the language had become a full-time project and had settled enough to attempt a production compiler. In May 2008, Ian Taylor independently started on a GCC front end for Go using the draft specification. Russ Cox joined in late 2008 and helped move the language and libraries from prototype to reality.

Many others have contributed ideas, discussions, and code.

Why are you creating a new language?

Go was born out of frustration with existing languages and environments for systems programming. Programming had become too difficult and the choice of languages was partly to blame. One had to choose either efficient compilation, efficient execution, or ease of programming; all three were not available in the same mainstream language. Programmers who could were choosing ease over safety and efficiency by moving to dynamically typed languages such as Python and JavaScript rather than C++ or, to a lesser extent, Java.

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. It also aims to be modern, with support for networked and multicore computing. Finally, it is intended to be fast: it should take at most a few seconds to build a large executable on a single computer. To meet these goals required addressing a number of linguistic issues: an expressive but lightweight type system; concurrency and garbage collection; rigid dependency specification; and so on. These cannot be addressed well by libraries or tools; a new language was called for.

Agreed.

From the page: Hey, kid, believe in yourself all you want. And hell, even go the Bill Gates route if that is "what God intended" for you. But I would never even debate changing the grade of this student.