It’s a good thing that Go is such a good language, because getting started with it is downright PAINFUL compared to Ruby or Python.
I'm not sure that's particularly true. Getting started is easy: 1. Install go. 2. mkdir -p ~/go/src/yourproject 3. Start writing Go in yourproject. go build will build your code. go install will put your executable in ~/go/bin. When you need some code from github, run "go get" and don't worry about where it goes. You're just starting out.
Compare getting started with Python: 1. Install python. 2. Create your project directory anywhere you like. 3. Start writing python. Python will run your code. pip will install libraries if you ask for them. Don't worry about where they are going, you're just starting out.
Other than "choice of directory" that's not very different.
Industrial-strength dependency management is harder than that, but you can retrofit it on later quite easily in Go. Both dep and vgo (from personal experience, I assume others too) can examine a project that is a mess of hand-vendored directories and references to the general package space and extract out a manifest file for you, which is probably exactly what you want, since it will reflect the current project.
It may actually even be easier than Python here, since Go source can be examined and the exact packages you are using confidently and accurately plucked out; I don't recall if pip has a "just examine this directory and freeze its exact dependencies" command and blew out my "HN comment time budget" trying to google the answer. In Go, you can just cruise along for a long time, using dozens of packages, and drop dep or vgo in at the last minute and get functional dependency management on your existing project in one command. I've converted two projects that ended up using over 30 packages (at least a middlin' size in the Go world) each to dep in the ~5 minutes it took "dep init". (It checks things out fresh, so that's mostly source code retrieval.)
Well, not that good. Decent would be the best one could say. It has many special cases and warts, and lacks a few very standard features. But let's not get into that here.
>because getting started with it is downright PAINFUL compared to Ruby or Python
If you mean regarding package management, maybe. In other terms, not really painful at all. It's one of the easiest languages to just download, code, and build your code -- you can even cross-compile with like 2 extra ENV settings.
Is this about being used to dynamic programming and not groking types and "pointers" in Go?
About the tooling?
About the lack of certain features like generics?