The reason this is the case, I think, is that Go strives to make algorithmic complexity clear: you know when you're allocating memory, but you don't need to jump through hoops to do it. You know the rough performance costs of what you're doing because the core team works hard to make it obvious. For example, some regular expressions features (lookahead, if I remember correctly) aren't implemented in the Go standard library's regular expression package, because they're impossible to achieve in O(n) time. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang-nuts/7qgSDWPI...
This level of care in making simple, clearly-defined tools with known properties makes it easy to code well. Ruby, Python, PHP, NodeJS... you can shoot yourself in the foot and not even notice.