I attended a tutorial on Go, and while I liked much of what I heard, the tutorial was so poorly done that I did not leave with a good high-level understanding.

I also left with the impression that it is very early days with Go, in the sense that several parts of the language are evolving. (Or maybe I have this impression because the presenter loved diving into ratholes.)

If you have an hour go through http://tour.golang.org/#1. If you're like me and can't enjoy a new language without connecting it to the network and passing some JSON around, check out http://golang.org/doc/articles/wiki/ and take a look at http://golang.org/pkg/encoding/json/#Marshal (if, also like me, you're picky about field name casing, pay attention to the little bit about `json:"myName"`)

I'll second this.

I went through the Tour of Go over a 3-day weekend when I didn't have many obligations and messed with a reasonable portion of the examples although none of the exercises (I think).

I really like it, although I don't think it replaces C's niche. But I think for the level where you'd like some of the structure and goodies of C++ or Java without the complexity it's pretty compelling.

The main thing I've been wishing were different about Go recently is that I wish it could generate some kind of C style dlls that could be interfaced with from other languages. It seems that Go wants to be the top-level, so I don't really know a way to use it for libraries or extensions for other languages.

So instead I'm considering C and Lua - C for the library with possibly a linked or embedded Lua to give some higher level niceties.

My hope is that I could create extensions that are callable from other languages using C APIs and then in the extension push some of the actual computations to Lua when it makes sense to use things like lists/dictionaries.