Am I the only one who thinks it's crazy that people would compete for jobs because of a language? Especially a new language? Would anyone seriously give up a job just for the opportunity to program in another language?
Perhaps this is a bigger thing among corporate programmers? I've only worked at smaller companies where they are more open to experimenting if you talk them into it.
Many programmers have fairly strong preferences about programming languages and definitely many people would consider a Go job more desirable than a Java job. Most of those people aren't currently Java programmers - it's said[1] that Go is largely attracting people from dynamic languages and not from C++/Java.
[1]
See this essay from Rob Pike where he says Go is attracting programmers mostly from dynamic languages (though he raises C++ programmers as the chief contrast, but still mentions Java too) : http://commandcenter.blogspot.fi/2012/06/less-is-exponential...
It's an interesting phenomenon indeed. Coming from C++ and Prolog, I disliked Java quite a bit, but took two positions where Java was the main language (because they were interesting NLP/ML positions). In the end it's a tool to get interesting work done.
I follow some PL lists and there seems to be a sizeable group of people who prefer a position in their favorite language. Of course, I don't know what portion of the overal market they represent.
Perhaps this is a bigger thing among corporate programmers? I've only worked at smaller companies where they are more open to experimenting if you talk them into it.