Jon Bodner shared a deep dive into why the world depends on simple, reliable, well-understood technologies like Go.

The one exciting thing that Go has is built-in concurrency support via goroutines, channels, and select. However, it is based on ideas from CSP, communicating sequential processes, which was first described in 1978.

This doesn’t sound like a programming language from the 21st century, does it?

And yet, Go is the 3rd most wanted and (maybe not coincidentally) the 3rd highest paying language, according to Stack Overflow. Every startup in Silicon Valley is using Go to build their infrastructure. Docker, Kubernetes, etcd, Terraform, Vault, Consul, Traefik and lots of other cutting-edge projects are written in Go. So what’s going on? Why is everyone interested in this boring language?

As a fun aside, I searched the Go Time transcripts for the word “boring” and found this gem from Kelsey Hightower on Go Time #114…

When infrastructure gets boring, something else will become exciting above it.

…which makes sense why Go being boring is fantastic, because there’s so many exciting things being built with it.