> But it didn't touch the important question -- is the development time for Go faster than for scripting languages with critical sections in C?

At YouTube (which is a predominantly Python shop) we use Go for some elements of our infrastructure, and I spend approximately half of my time working in each language (main project in Go, integration tests in Python). In my experience easy things (say, split and massage some strings) are more complicated/annoying in Go than in Python (and much more verbose). However, difficult things usually end up being much simpler in Go than in Python – especially if they involve concurrency (Python threading is a trainwreck). The difficult parts of our code consume most of our brainpower, so that's a net gain from our point of view. What is more, for some weird reason Go code seems to be less susceptible to bitrot (go fmt FTW).