Another commenter points out that Go has Google backing it, which is a significant confounding factor in terms of figuring out how good it is on its own merits.

I’ll add to this and say that Go is a language that is very well-suited for Google’s issues. Namely, take a bunch of engineers with a particular area of familiarity (e.g. familiarity with C and/or Java) and throw them at code, scaling up by number-of-engineers where necessary.

My issue with pointing to this and calling it “practical” and “easy to understand” is twofold:

(1) Go implicitly makes its ease of understanding dependent on an having existing background knowledge of concepts that the HN crowd is likely to have, themselves, which biases people but isn’t particularly easy to learn on its own merits (versus, say, Python)

(2) Most companies cannot afford to solve engineering problems by throwing more bodies at it, but with Go your option is either that or leveraging external code generation

As far as “taking the time to get each piece right”, this stuff isn’t cutting edge technology development! Go isn’t doing dependent typing or borrow checking or scoped effects!

Everything that people lambast the language over not having is old hat, it’s like defending a car manufacturer who chose to use carburetors over fuel injection by saying that they’re trying to figure out how to do it right.