There's no doubt for me that 2016 was the year where Go started to pick up far more traction than it ever had before, but it's not clear to me why. There is no major stand-out feature in the 1.7 release that suddenly makes it a killer language, and there are no major applications you can point to that emerged in 2016 and think "well, there you go". Ruby's rise was coupled with Rails, Go's rise seems to be a simple desire to build scalable concurrent applications.

Google's language also got second place with Dart, which I find interesting: the fact it's being used for the next generation of AdWords at Google suggests that it has serious buy-in inside those walls, and could be one to watch.

I like Go because of its simple and specific way of doing things rather than just piling a whole bunch of language features. Great tooling and your runtime and app in a single binary.

Oh one more thing, no classes so no more convoluted control flows and the stupid idea of working with "objects" when all you have is data.