Go is a programming language created by Google engineers to be concise, compile quickly, and support concurrency. It shares similarities with C in syntax and compiled output but includes automatic memory management and built-in support for concurrency. A basic Go program consists of packages, imported packages, functions, variables, and statements. The document then provides examples of a simple Go program that prints "Hello" and explains how to save, compile, and run it. It also discusses Go's performance advantages over other languages and how it is compiled to efficient machine code like C.