Go (or Golang) was developed by Google employees – Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson – in 2007 as a result of their growing frustration with other backend development languages used by the company, especially C++.
Their main objective was to build a way to write code optimized for performance and usability. In the era of large databases and multicore machines, the co-creators wanted the language to be efficient, first and foremost. That’s why Go’s syntax is clean and uncomplicated, and the language was quickly adopted by Google and other companies.
Read more about Golang’s origins and evolution, check our introduction to this language on our blog:
On the other hand, Python was created with the primary goal of creating a readable, high-level programming language that could be used for multiple purposes. From the start, the code base is also set up in a way that makes it easy to share with others. The main reason behind these in-built features of Python is Guido Van Rossum’s involvement with the Corporation for National Research Initiatives and its Computer Programming for Everybody (CP4E) program at the time. The scheme was developed in 1991 to help people learn to program and gain coding literacy similar to English or mathematics basic skills. That’s why Python had to be easy to learn and appeal to non-developers.
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When it comes to comparing these two programming languages, it’s important to remember that both of the technologies were created with specific, very different goals in mind and that the communities surrounding them are also focused on incomparable and distinct undertakings.
While Python is widely used in data science, including machine learning, Go is ideal for server-side commands and running software. The very apparent advantage of Python is how easy to share and read the code base is, so it has a large developer community. Golang has not been the most popular technology so far, but it has a steady following from DevOps experts and the like as it’s one of the fastest languages out there.
Now, we have this quick overview out of the way, let’s dive a bit deeper and compare how Python and Go compare the crucial aspects that will help you weigh in on which technology to use for your project.
When it comes to how popular each of these languages is among developers, I have to recognize Python’s dominance. In the annual Stack Overflow Developer Survey, Python is the 4th most widely-used technology, with Go ranking far below, in 13th place.