One day I was bored and derping around on codepen. I've heard people say that Go was a great server side language with the speed of C and the ease of use of JavaScript (also I'm just a huge google fanboy). I don't know if that's really true, but I definitely don't not like Go so far. The easiest way to get started in my opinion is to just load up coderpad.io, choose Go for your language, and just play around in the web IDE.
The Coderpad Starter
At the time of this writing, when you choose a new Go pad it starts you out with some simple code (scroll to the bottom if you want to see it all at once). I'll go through it step by step and then show it in all it's glory at the end.
Comments
Right off the bat we can see that a double slash ( // ) is a familiar symbol that signifies the line should be treated as a comment.
// To execute Go code, please declare a func main() in a
The Main Func
Reading the comment, we see that the function called "main" kicks off your program. The name "main" is important similar to Java's "main" constructor method that kicks off a class, but there are no classes like Java. Instead it's a func (aka function) similar to Es5 JavaScript or functional programming languages.
func main() {
}
Package
Also similar to Java (and also ActionScript 3), we have this name-spacing sort of deal that uses the package keyword. This is basically the directory path in which this file lives.
package main
Putting "package main" means this file is in a folder called main (I think). Although for codepen it doesn't really matter all that much since you're usually just using one file in a codepen (at least I am, anyway).
Imports
Then we can import some libraries that we need. To be honest, I'm not really sure what fmt means, and I don't feel like looking it up [ok fine- it's just short for format]. Just know that in order to log text to the console you need to import this library.
import "fmt"
Logging Text to the Console
We can then log text to the console by using the Println method.
fmt.Println("Derp!");
For Loops
Aside from that weird assignment symbol that uses a colon, for loops don't look all that weird- wait a minute; there are no parentheses in the for statement. That's a little weird... Anyway, here's an example one of of these here for loopers:
for i := 0; i < 5; i++ { fmt.Println("Hello, World!") }
All Together Now!
That's pretty much all you need to know to understand the snippet of starter code in your coderpad IDE when you switch to Go. You might as well buy a tee-shirt and call yourself a Go developer now. You're welcome. Lol.
// To execute Go code, please declare a func main() in a package "main" package main import "fmt" func main() { for i := 0; i < 5; i++ { fmt.Println("Hello, World!") } }
Bonus: Calling Functions!
Now that you know the ropes you might want to create some functions and call them. Well, just define new functions with the "func" keyword and call them by typing out their name followed by opening and closing parens. Notice that we can call a function before we define it in the code:
func main() { derp(); } func derp() { fmt.Println("Derp!"); }
What Do You Think?
I think the Go syntax makes sense. At the moment it seems really similar to Java or JavaScript, but it feels like they tried really hard to make it as terse syntax as possible which I guess is good because you have less characters. It's really not a huge difference from writing the word function and looks a little funny not having parentheses in the for loop, but it doesn't bother me that much. hehe. Anyway, I need to look more into Go and actually use it to see what type of projects it would be good for, but at least for derping around in codepen it's a pretty nice, straight-to-the-point language. I like Go, and I look forward to using it more. How do you feel about Go Lang?
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