Standardizing Go
The web is abuzz with the recent announcement of the Go Programming Language . I've put a decent bit of thought into similar issues over the years, so I thought I'd chime in on the discussion. To start with, Go is targeting a niche which I think has been need of filling for a long time. The Go home page bills it as "a systems programming language", but I don't think that name completely reflects the niche's whole scope. My interest in this niche came from writing programs to play games like chess and other zero-sum board games. At the bleeding edge of chess programming, developers always want to milk the limits of optimization to boost their search speed. This inexorably leads to the desire to write critical code in assembly language, and has generally led to these programs being written in C or C++. You don't usually think of chess programs as "systems programs", so instead of using the name "systems" to describe this niche, I...