• Guest on Cup o’ Go podcast: John Arundel was a guest on the podcast and chatted with hosts Jonathan Hall and Shay Nehmad about teaching and learning Go. The full interview can be listened to at Cup o’ Go #21: John Arundel interview.
• About himself: John is a writer of Go books (https://bitfieldconsulting.co... and teaches Go. He also writes Go programs (https://github.com/bitfield) but doesn't get paid as much for it.
• Teaching methods: He offers private lessons online (https://bitfieldconsulting.co... and has a video course (https://bitfieldconsulting.co... He also works with companies. Just get in touch at (https://bitfieldconsulting.co...
• Name and art: The name of his site is Bitfield Consulting (https://bitfieldconsulting.co... The art on his site includes a nice repo of free Gopher clip art by Maria Letta (https://github.com/MariaLetta... with high-res PNG images and SVGs.
• Teaching Go experience: It's a mix of students. Some have experience in other languages but not Go, some have experience in Go but feel there's more to learn, and some have no programming experience at all.
• Opinion on Go as first language: He likes the idea that Go shouldn't be the last language one learns. While it's good to have exposure to multiple languages, diving deep into one or two is also valuable.
• Introduction to Go: John has been programming for a long time and used many languages. He initially didn't like Go when it was announced but later learned it when consulting with a company. He came from Perl and had trouble adapting to the Go way of thinking.
• Consulting and teaching: He used to be a consultant and enjoyed teaching people how to fix things themselves. He decided to focus on teaching and writing about Go as he found it more fun.
• Importance of fun in programming: He believes programming should be fun. Many working programmers don't feel that way, but those who have fun make the quickest progress and become the best software engineers.
• Advice for struggling Go learners: The best way to learn is by writing programs related to something they're interested in, like cryptography or networking. Content creation is also great, like writing blog posts. Pairing with students and seeing mistakes helps too.
• Feature removal from Go: He could dispense with a few things like complex number types (unless you're a physicist) and goto. The short declaration form (:=) causes a lot of confusion due to shadowing.
• Feature addition to Go: He doesn't think there's anything he would add to Go. He loves the minimalist mindset and that Go has stolen the right ideas from other languages. He was surprised by the Go team's reaction when he said he didn't want anything added.
• Conclusion: It was a pleasure for John to be on the podcast and he thanked the hosts for having him.