Go is not simple (conceptually) by any strecth of imagination. Golang has pointers bolted on as if they are a real thing. Like, what's the point of exposing pointers without the pointer arithmetic when modern languages have come up with simpler ways to think about accessing memory? So, as a Go developer are you supposed to understand pointers or not? Similarly with Go routines, people boast about them as if they are a silver bullet for concurrent programming. But then, you also have and need to use sync primitives like mutexes sometimes. So, you still need to understand accessing shared mutable state and it's challenges well to use Go which is the actually complex part of concurrent programming. So, I don't know what people mean when they say Golang is simpler. I find it an ugly, weird and a hyped up language. The languages I consider simple are C and Python. C is simple because it's a small language and Python because it truly abstracts away the low level details. Golang is an opinionated (an quite an unimpressive) language with pros and cons like any other language. Currently, with more cons than pros, IMHO.