I'm personally not a big fan of Go due to the weak type system, with lack of generics as the main offender. And as a result, the ubiquitous `interface{}` pattern, stringly typed annotations, ...
BUT Go offers simplicity, incredibly easy concurrency, decent performance, a good standard library for networking/http services, very quick compile times and a stricter type system than many other languages like Python/PHP.
For many teams, especially coming from more dynamic languages, Go fills a sweet spot of performance, concurrency, type safety and ease of use.
I love Rust, but it is much more complex, boilerplate heavy, adds more friction, is harder to learn, and concurrency is much harder to get right, even with the upcoming async/await feature. Not to mention the immature ecosystem, that will still need years of catching up to achieve parity with Go.
Kotlin is also a great language, but has it's own downsides. You need to learn and understand Java (due to the many Java dependencies that you will pull in), there often will be a mismatch between Java libraries and idiomatic Kotlin code, concurrency is harder than in Go, and the JVM is a much more complex beast then the minimally tunable Go runtime.
Go definitely has a place, even though it often wouldn't be my own first choice.
BUT Go offers simplicity, incredibly easy concurrency, decent performance, a good standard library for networking/http services, very quick compile times and a stricter type system than many other languages like Python/PHP.
For many teams, especially coming from more dynamic languages, Go fills a sweet spot of performance, concurrency, type safety and ease of use.
I love Rust, but it is much more complex, boilerplate heavy, adds more friction, is harder to learn, and concurrency is much harder to get right, even with the upcoming async/await feature. Not to mention the immature ecosystem, that will still need years of catching up to achieve parity with Go.
Kotlin is also a great language, but has it's own downsides. You need to learn and understand Java (due to the many Java dependencies that you will pull in), there often will be a mismatch between Java libraries and idiomatic Kotlin code, concurrency is harder than in Go, and the JVM is a much more complex beast then the minimally tunable Go runtime.
Go definitely has a place, even though it often wouldn't be my own first choice.