Go (Golang)

Go remains the most pragmatic language for backend services and infrastructure tooling in 2026. Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, and Prometheus are all written in Go — meaning the DevOps and platform engineering job market heavily rewards Go knowledge. Google designed Go for large-team velocity: strong opinions about formatting, no inheritance, fast compile times, and first-class goroutines for concurrency. Median Go developer salary: $141k — the highest on this list. Best use case: microservices, CLI tools, and anything that needs to deploy as a single binary.