I think this is an amazing milestone; I contributed to Go in the early phases and was very excited about the project. I even had Rob Pike OK some of my patches (which was a huge nerd ego boost, obviously).
However, the direction the language took ended up being quite predictable and somewhat of a bore. The problem with Go is that it doesn't seem to fit any particular niche. Some other design decisions were questionable (no exception handling, for one).
I kind of like Go, but I haven't used it for years. There's no real reason to NOT write something in C (or, rarely, C++) or Java, or if I need some serious scaling, Erlang (or just use either something like libevent for C or Kilim for Java).
Go is very D-like. D, like Go, can't really find its niche. If Go or D were more idiomatic, perhaps they would be adopted in early programming classes (high schools and colleges -- like Python, for example), but even though goroutines, channels, and fast compilation are interesting concepts, they aren't really enough to detract from writing in the many other languages that do just about the same thing (and are a lot more popular).
Have you used it since 3 days after it was launched, more than three years ago? (That's when you contributed.)
The language, libraries, and ecosystem are miles ahead of where they were back in 2009.
Why not use C? Because C has no sensible packaging system, is unsafe, requires manual memory management, and offers a degree of control that is unnecessary for most tasks. Why not use Java? Because it is verbose and picky and basically forces you to use an IDE to get anything done, etc etc. If there were nothing wrong with these languages (they're the main ones we use at Google) we wouldn't have developed Go.
Use Go more! You'll see why people love it, and why we created it.
I'd love to use Go to replace some projects I've written in C and Java.
I evaluated Go last week (2013-03), but there is no meaningful Eclipse IDE support. goclipse doesn't work half as well as CDT, and not a patch on JDT.
I won't move away from eclipse workflows and project management, the context switch is more expensive than any language benefit.
I'll keep checking for comprehensive Go support in Eclipse, but until then it is a showstopper.
I use GolangIDE[1] after getting fed up with Eclipse. It's really nice as it's a much lower memory footprint, yet basically does everything you need an IDE to do (ie edit code, debug, etc)
More common main page: http://code.google.com/p/liteide/ Downloads: http://code.google.com/p/golangide/downloads/list Code: https://github.com/visualfc/liteide