If IRC activity correlates to interest in the language, then data shows a bleak picture of interest in go-lang. Here is the total character count per day as a percentage of the activity on November 12, 2009.
http://i.imgur.com/8ERaf.png
X axis is days (approx) since 11/12/09
Y is % of chars as compared with the busiest day (11/12/09)
I've used the language for big projects and little projects. The strict error handling is fantastic. I like everything about the language except one thing. Just one, and it's a big nasty thing. I hope Russ, Rob, Iant or someone from the development team reads this, because it needs to be said, and others have said it, and it's the reason I stopped programming in go. Go might not need generics, the go development team might not need generics, but I DO! You wonder why there isn't a rocking go web framework? Because generics would be a huge help and no one wants to piece together a tedious solution immediately deprecated by the announcement we've been waiting a year for, "Go is getting generics!" All I want for christmas is generics ... and a pony.
Nah, the interest for new things from big companies always peaks shortly after the announcement. If you cut off the outliers e.g. before day 45 then this graph would look much rosier. Or, to put it another way, would the graph for any successful language like Python or C look any different in the first year after the initial announcement?
Those languages were all quite old and popular by the time those graphs started. It's not apples-to-apples to compare languages with a decade or more of use to a language whose inception was a year ago.
