Maybe unlike other respondents, I'm a Go amateur. I've written three projects in Go, one of a few thousand lines and two of a few hundred. Also unlike many others, I consider Go un-elegant to the point of being ugly. In other words, I'm no expert and no fanboy.
What makes Go my go-to language for certain kinds of projects (I'll doubtless be using it again) is that it gets shit done. It has the brutal simplicity and hardware proximity (and raw speed) of C combined with the small handful of things that most significantly contribute to make Java better than C: A simple type system, garbage collection, usable string handling and dynamic data structures (arrays and hash maps). Go also has a fairly large, useful library.
Multiple return values often including errors make error/exception handling very explicit and in-your-face. When something can go wrong, you the programmer are forced to recognize that and deal with it as soon as the function returns. That's a Good Thing IMO. Java-style exception handling, by comparison, looks to me like an elaborate language hack for passing the buck.
There's a ruthless kind of efficiency in Go's surrounding philosophy. There's one way to format Go code, you let the utility take care of it and never worry about formating again. The compiler won't tolerate various kinds of sloppiness, such as unused imports.
As somebody else mentioned, in Go, writing elegant code is not a consideration because it's nearly impossible. Well, I'm sure there are "better" and "worse" ways to write Go code, but not so obviously that I'd be tempted to give it a lot of thought. So I tend to just sit there and write code by the bucketful until I'm done.
Finally, the tooling gets the job done, and quickly. I can compile for and across various hardware environments and ship executables that don't rely on a JVM or other external dependencies.
What makes Go my go-to language for certain kinds of projects (I'll doubtless be using it again) is that it gets shit done. It has the brutal simplicity and hardware proximity (and raw speed) of C combined with the small handful of things that most significantly contribute to make Java better than C: A simple type system, garbage collection, usable string handling and dynamic data structures (arrays and hash maps). Go also has a fairly large, useful library.
Multiple return values often including errors make error/exception handling very explicit and in-your-face. When something can go wrong, you the programmer are forced to recognize that and deal with it as soon as the function returns. That's a Good Thing IMO. Java-style exception handling, by comparison, looks to me like an elaborate language hack for passing the buck.
There's a ruthless kind of efficiency in Go's surrounding philosophy. There's one way to format Go code, you let the utility take care of it and never worry about formating again. The compiler won't tolerate various kinds of sloppiness, such as unused imports.
As somebody else mentioned, in Go, writing elegant code is not a consideration because it's nearly impossible. Well, I'm sure there are "better" and "worse" ways to write Go code, but not so obviously that I'd be tempted to give it a lot of thought. So I tend to just sit there and write code by the bucketful until I'm done.
Finally, the tooling gets the job done, and quickly. I can compile for and across various hardware environments and ship executables that don't rely on a JVM or other external dependencies.