The Go Programming Language

Ken Thompson (Multics, B, Ed, regular expressions, Unix, Plan 9), Rob Pike (sam, Plan 9, Limbo, Inferno), and Robert Griesemer (Java Hotspot compiler) have been working on a new programming language since 2007, which has just been announced by Google.  A couple of the names  associated with Go are virtually biblical within the programming community so I expect Go will get a lot of attention.  The thing I find enthralling is that it intends to address concurrency within the language like Limbo, not as an add-on library.  It also attempts to be more like interpreted, dynamically typed languages like Python that are widely used especially for web-based programming.

"Go is an attempt to combine the ease of programming of an interpreted, dynamically typed language with the efficiency and safety of a statically typed, compiled language. It also aims to be modern, with support for networked and multicore computing. Finally, it is intended to be fast: it should take at most a few seconds to build a large executable on a single computer. To meet these goals required addressing a number of linguistic issues: an expressive but lightweight type system; concurrency and garbage collection; rigid dependency specification; and so on. These cannot be addressed well by libraries or tools; a new language was called for.

"Go is mostly in the C family (basic syntax), with significant input from the Pascal/Modula/Oberon family (declarations, packages), plus some ideas from languages inspired by Tony Hoare's CSP, such as Newsqueak and Limbo (concurrency)."

There is a FAQ and an hour long video on the language.