How do you feel about Go as a first language?

<p>Is Go a good first language? Why or why not? If it is, does age matter? For example, raspberry pi&#39;s and python are aimed at getting kids foot in the door with programming. Can or should we do the same with Go?</p> <hr/>**评论：**<br/><br/>neoasterisk: <pre><p>I feel that one truly appreciates Go once they&#39;ve felt the frustration of other language ecosystems. That said I don&#39;t think it&#39;s a bad choice for a first language. On the contrary. The way Go&#39;s ecosystem works, it supports and promotes good engineering practices. Think about testing, coverage, docs, examples, benchmarks etc. They are just baked in the culture and the tooling supports them better than any other language I&#39;ve encountered.</p> <p>Nevertheless, I believe there is a lack of &#34;user friendliness&#34; on the existing documentation, examples, learning materials and tutorials. That can certainly be improved.</p></pre>GoTheFuckToBed: <pre><p>Go over python.</p></pre>myzt: <pre><p>I would say Python being an interpreted language is better suited for kids. Having to learn how to build and/or run a project will probably be discouraging.</p></pre>SupersonicSpitfire: <pre><p>You can ´go run main.go´ just as easily as ´python3 main.py´.</p></pre>8carlosf: <pre><p>Well, I&#39;m a learn the hard way guy, I rather learn C first, because you also need to learn a bit about how the hardware works (memory and cache/cpu).</p> <p>But Go vs Python, I think Go is a better option, mainly because of the minimalism by design.</p> <p>Both Go and C are languages small enough that you can understand them almost fully, and after that you know that your knowledge of the language is enough to do everything, and sometimes that&#39;s all the incentive you need to figure it out.</p> <p>That said, most of programming knowledge apply&#39;s to every language, it doesn&#39;t matter that much where you start, learn how to do it right, and you can evolve/move to another language latter without that much effort.</p></pre>seblw: <pre><p>I had learnt C first, wanted to learn Go for specifically for backend programming but found python tutorials more comprehensive and mature so I happily use them. Still learning Go though!</p></pre>ringMyPachelbel: <pre><p>Go is a mix a high level libraries with low level concepts. I learned C and Python prior to learning Go and found that it was way easier to understand pointers, and use slices than if I had jumped in to Go first.</p> <p>While I do think it is possible to learn Go as a first language, I wouldn&#39;t suggest it to anyone. It doesn&#39;t seem feasible to teach someone to build a car before learning about the different kinds of circuits.</p></pre>thewhitetulip: <pre><p>I strongly feel that Go should be the third language (possibly fourth) after C, C++/Java, Python. This is because Go is significantly different from other languages <em>with</em> a reason! Once you/we understand the limitations or issues in other languages, it is a treat to write code in Go. Also, if you learn C first, then you can easily pick up any other language of the C family (practically all langs are C derivatives). But if you learn Go first then there is no such history, considering Go&#39;s syntax for functions is totally different from the ordinary syntax.</p></pre>