To be human is to be an unwilling passenger in a winding, aimless journey we call life. Each of us has felt the eternal solidarity of time break apart as we are thrust into existence to navigate the tribulations of existing, left only to wonder what the point of it all is. Just as we become complacent in our respective existential struggles, an event of unspeakable force shakes the foundations of our reality: we fall in love.
Falling in love is as exhausting as it is enchanting. Our lifespans only have the willing capacity to fall in love a finite number of times, if at all. This realization is responsible for making us wary of falling in love in the first place, as well as zealously defending the love we’ve found against potential intruders. I’m one to advocate for an opposite conclusion. As difficult, scary, or time-consuming as love may be, I argue that a life that has discovered love on multiple occasions is a life well-lived. If that makes me a slut, so be it: I am a slut for programming languages.
I’ve proudly maintained a long-term loving commitment to Python, as well as a complicated affair with JavaScript. Still, even this promiscuous lifestyle can leave one yearning for a kind of love that only a statically-typed language can deliver. As our relationships transition from scripting honeymoons to mature enterprise-level endeavors, it’s natural to second-guess our choices. Why endure the overhead of a dynamically typed language when we end up annotating types with MyPy? Could there be validity in arguments that claim our language of choice is “slow?” And do we really think we can put up with baggage known as the GIL till death do us part?
If this all seems like a roundabout way to announce that I’ve been fooling around with Golang, that’s because it absolutely is. I don’t suspect that many people are willing or capable of leaving their comfort zones to partake in a journey of this magnitude. For the rest of you, I’d like to welcome you by my side for a short moment in our lives to explore the unexplored. Who knows, perhaps you’ll even find love along the way.
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