What is Go
Go is a language developed at Google in 2009, and has since been adopted extensively in diverse use cases, including cloud infrastructure, and high-performance web services.
Hugo (the static site generator that this website is built on) is built using the Go programming language and also the Go templating language, which enables flexible and efficient content rendering.
Golang and Go template
The Go programming language (golang.org) is a general-purpose, statically typed, compiled language designed for efficiency, simplicity, and concurrency.
In contrast, the Go templating language (pkg.go.dev/text/template, How to Use Templates in Go - Digital Ocean) is a specific feature within Go, designed for processing dynamic text output, such as generating HTML, configuration files, or structured documents.
While Go itself provides the full power of a programming language, Go templates are a more limited domain-specific language (DSL) focused on string interpolation, loops, conditionals, and function calls within templates.
They share syntax and principles, but Go templates are interpreted at runtime rather than compiled into machine code. This means that in a Hugo website, Go templates dynamically generate HTML when the site is built, using content and layout rules, whereas Go programs themselves are compiled into a binary executable before they run.