Should Web Developers Know Go?
Learning Go for web development is not a must, there are many other server-side programming languages that you can use in place of Go. These programming languages include Python, PHP, Javascript, Java, Ruby, Kotlin, Elixir, Scala, C#, etc.
Since its design by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson at Google 2012, Go has grown in popularity and usage in web development and other software development fields. A 2021 Stack Overflow Survey reported that Go is loved by 62.74% of professional developers versus 37.26% of developers who dreaded it.
According to statistics from w3techs.com, “Go is used by less than 0.1% of all the websites whose server-side programming language we know.” Unlike most other server-side programming languages, Go’s usage for web development has slowly been increasing over the years, slowly becoming a popular choice for many companies and businesses.
Go is an open-source, statically typed, and compiled programming language supported by Google. It is designed to build fast, reliable, and efficient software at scale. Its efficiency and syntax are similar to C, but its readability and usability are similar to Python or Javascript, making it very easy to get started with.
Go is used widely for Web development projects, DevOps & Site Reliability, Cloud & Network Services, and command-line interfaces. About 9.55% of professional developers use Go for a variety of software development purposes.
There are many popular websites and companies using Go, some of them include Twitter, Uber, CloudFlare, American Express, Paypal, Bitly, Meta, Dropbox, Netflix, Microsoft, Google, Target, and many others. It can be seen that Go is loved, trusted, and used by a lot of big companies and businesses.
Even though Go is popular and widely used among developers, there are many other alternatives that you can use for server-side programming, meaning that, learning Go for web development is completely optional.
WHAT ARE ALTERNATIVES TO GO FOR WEB DEVELOPMENT
There are many server-side programming languages that you can use as an alternative to Go. Here are some of the popular ones:
PHP
PHP is the most popular server-side programming language, it powers more websites on the internet than the rest of the server-side programming languages put together.
According to statistics from w3techs.com, “PHP is used by 77.5% of all the websites whose server-side programming language we know.” PHP website usage has been decreasing over the years, but it will take more than 25 years to decrease to 50% at the rate at which it is decreasing.
To make your development process easy, quick, and well structured, you can use PHP frameworks such as Laravel, Symfony, CodeIgniter, Slim, Zend, Phalcon, CakePHP, and many others.
PHP is used by many popular platforms and websites such as WordPress, Drupal, Wikipedia, Facebook, Slack, Etsy, Tumblr, MailChimp, etc. PHP is simple to work with and it is a great alternative to Go.
NODE.JS
Node.js is an open-source Javascript runtime environment that runs on the V8 Engine. It is cross-platform and is used to run Javascript outside of the web browser. Node.js is used by web developers for server scripting.
It is commonly used in the Javascript stack such as the MERN (MongoDB, Express.js, React, Node) and MEAN (MongoDB, Express, Angular, Node) Stack. To make it easy to work with Node.js, frameworks such as Express.js, Sails.js, Koa.js, etc. are popularly used.
You can use Node.js as an alternative to Go, especially if you like working with Javascript.
PYTHON
Python has an easy-to-understand syntax that makes it easy to write code. Getting started with Python is much easier than with Go. Python is used a lot by web developers for backend development. According to a 2021 Stack Overflow survey, Python is the third most used programming language by professional developers.
Python Django is one of the most popular web development frameworks, it was used to build part of the Instagram backend. Other python web frameworks that can be used in place of the Go include Flask, FastAPI, CherryPy, Falcon, etc.
JAVA
You can also use Java as an alternative to Go for server-side programming. Java is used by many websites, especially in the enterprise world. You can learn more about how Java is used in Web Development in our article DO YOU NEED JAVA FOR WEB DEVELOPMENT.
RUBY
Since its invention in 1995 by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto of Japan, Ruby has grown in popularity and usage to become the third most widely used server-side programming language after PHP and ASP.NET.
According to statistics from w3techs.com, “Ruby is used by 5.9% of all the websites whose server-side programming language we know.” Ruby usage for making websites has been decreasing over the years, but it is still one of the popular choices for many companies and startups.
Ruby is much easier to work with than Go, its syntax is simple, elegant, and English-like, similar to that of Python. Getting started with Ruby and Ruby on Rails for web development is very easy and you will serve a lot of development time by using this language and its framework.
The popular online E-commerce store builder Shopify was written in Ruby (Ruby on Rails). Other popular websites using Ruby include Twitter, Github, Basecamp, Airbnb, Dribbble, Hulu, Kickstarter, Zendesk, Fiverr, SoundCloud, and many others.
There are many other alternatives to Go that I have not listed here. The availability and usage of many other powerful server-side programming languages and frameworks show that you can work on web development projects without using Go.
CONCLUSION
It can be seen that even though Go is popular and widely used by a lot of web developers and companies, learning Go for web development is completely optional, and you can do without Go. Less than 0.1% of all websites use Go, leaving a huge room for other server-side programming languages such as Python, C#, Ruby, Scala, PHP, Java, etc.
If you want to make a website but you do not want to write any server-side or frontend code, you can use Website builders like WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, .Bubble etc. to do all the heavy lifting for you. You can make powerful websites without writing any line of code.
