Is the Go programming language (also known as Golang) poised to become even bigger?

According to the TIOBE Index, which attempts to rank the world’s most popular programming languages, Go is steadily gaining buzz, rising from the 13th to the 10th position over the past 12 months. “Go is not revolutionary, but its strength is in combining the right features,” read a note accompanying the latest ranking update. ‘It has built-in concurrency and garbage collection, is statically typed and has good performance.”

Go’s origins as a Google project also helps: “This improves the long-term trust in the language. Popular applications such as Docker and Kubernetes have been developed with the aid of Go.”

For those unfamiliar with the TIOBE Index, the website creates its rankings by leveraging data from a variety of aggregators and search engines, including Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, and Amazon. For a language to rank, it must be Turing complete, have its own Wikipedia entry, and earn more than 5,000 hits for +”<language> programming” on Google. While TIOBE’s rankings are critiqued as an imperfect way of determining a language’s true international usage, it’s nonetheless a good way of determining which languages the internet is chattering about.

As you might expect, the upper echelons of the Index are dominated by the likes of Python, C, Java, and C++. These languages’ outsized popularity is unlikely to fade anytime soon. In addition to Go, smaller languages on the rise include Rust, Fortran, and Scratch (which is primarily used in educational contexts).

Go regularly makes lists as one of the programming world’s fastest-growing and most-loved languages. If you’re interested in learning it, visit its dedicated website, which offers downloads, tutorials, documentation, and even a browser-based “playground” that allows you to write Go code for immediate compiling. As you learn, also check out sites such as web3schools that provide more in-depth tutorials on certain language features.