Go is a programming language created by Google to help solve problems with large software and hardware systems. It was designed to facilitate development of large codebases by many engineers. Some key problems it aimed to address were slowness, clumsiness and lack of productivity in other languages like C++. Go provides features like garbage collection, concurrency with goroutines and channels, and a standard library, while remaining simple and compiled. It grew from a small project at Google into an open source language adopted by many organizations.