The way I see it, there's very little compelling about Go to outweigh its shortfalls and I don't see it getting mainstream any time soon, if ever. If languages were stocks, I would have shorted it long before the HN hype started. Then again, I feel pretty much the same about the whole crop of hip languages du jour (scala, clojure, erlang, haskell, ...)
For those of us coming from Python, Perl, etc., Golang brings performance and concurrency in a format that is easy to pick up and integrate.
I have not touched C in almost 20 years, but I was able to write a concurrent program in Go that outperformed a similar multiprocessed Python script by about 5X in roughly one day. Go does not have the same library depth as Python, but the stdlib is pretty good.
The thing about Go that is similar to Python is _my_ performance is good, and I don't have to expend much effort in boilerplate code, or learn a coding approach that is unfamiliar, yet I still get relatively high performance.
Go won't replace Python for me, until things like matplotlib and Pandas become available, but it make an excellent addition to the toolkit.
