When I think about Go in comparison to other languages, I think of car metaphors. Lots of people talk about cars that are good. Some people think a good car is fast, some people think a good car is low maintenance, some people think a good car is eye-catching. They are all right, those are all descriptors of good cars.

Go, however, is like a Toyota Corolla or a Honda Civic. It's dependable, but relatively plain. It's not necessarily a joy to drive but there's not much of a learning curve. It lets you go fast, but not so fast you'd hurt yourself. It's designed with safety in mind, so much so that it can feel a little over-bearing at times.

It's not a language that draws you in with one clear feature or philosophy. I've used it very successfully and I still find myself rolling my eyes at "go-isms." Lines of "ok, err = ...", rewriting extremely similar data structures, careful channel management, etc. In a list of dependencies, the go dependency will need the least maintenance time and tuning, but what you do need will often be drudgery.

Go is a useful language, but it's a language that has purposefully stripped out all the magic. People like magic, they miss it.