alt Hacker NewsGo is strong. You get something where writing a solution doesn't take too much time, you get a type system, you can brute-force problems, and the usual mind-numbing boring data-manipulation handling fits well into the standard tools.
OCaml is strong too. Stellar type system, fast execution and sane semantics unlike like 99% of all programming languages. If you want to create elegant solutions to problems, it's a good language.
For both, I recommend coming prepared. Set up a scaffold and create a toolbox which matches the typical problems you see in AoC. There's bound to be a 2d grid among the problems, and you need an implementation. If it can handle out-of-bounds access gracefully, things are often much easier, and so on. You don't want to hammer the head against the wall not solving the problem, but solving parsing problems. Having a combinator-parser library already in the project will help, for instance.
> For both, I recommend coming prepared.
Any recommendations for Go? Traditionally I've gone for Python or Clojure with an 'only builtins or things I add myself' approach (e.g. no NetworkX), but I've been keen to try doing a year in Go however was a bit put off by the verbosity of the parsing and not wanting to get caught spending more time futzing with input lines and err.
Naturally later problems get more puzzle-heavy so the ratio of input-handling to puzzle-solving code changes, but it seemed a bit off putting for early days, and while I like a builtins-only approach it seems like the input handling would really benefit from a 'parse don't validate' type approach (goparsec?).