> One of Go's biggest strengths is that anyone can pick up the language and be somewhat productive in it after a week.

And then what? They find themselves duplicating the same code again and again because Go doesn’t provide good abstractions to reuse code. Or that they write a ton of code to do what could be achieved in a few lines in a reasonable language.

You learn the language in a week because there is not a lot to learn. Shell scripting is simple to learn as well, but nobody is building anything beyond short scripts using it.

An ideal language should allow the user to be a productive after a short time, but should have have enough power for advanced users as well.

One of the things I hate the most about Go is that source code generation is considered an acceptable solution to many problems. Perhaps I should go back to C — the preprocessor can be used to generate code as well as anything. In fact, the predecessor to C++ was a preprocessor used to generate C code that simulated C++ like behaviour.