To be fair, I feel like go's simplicity makes it easy to get small things up and running, but the pain comes when your project starts getting large. That's when additional abstractions are missed.
I work at a >1000 person company that codes mostly in Scala, and some in Go, and would prefer to read unknown Go code any day. With the Scala I run into things like implicit parameters and 7 layer of inheritance, but the Go code is straightforward.
Go is somewhat of a lowest common denominator language. You could out perform it with a small team of strong developers, but when once your project gets to a certain size, it's unlikely all of the developers will be strong.
And Go is just a little bit closer to the sweet spot than C was, since a greater proportion of Go code seems to successfully avoid extensive preprocessing.
On the other hand, it might be a bit too restrictive for prototyping to have these power limits. I definitely have an easier time feeling my way through an unknown data modelling problem if I can start slinging things together dynamically.
I do wonder if that's an inherent property of languages with a more expressive type system. Many would blame it on OOP, but I think Haskell also suffers from it. Haskell that is written without using typeclasses is much more readable than Haskell that's written more plainly, at least to me.
It might be a unique property to Go, which other language is strongly typed yet with such a basic typesystem, lacking inheritance or even generics?
Go is actually specifically built for large projects: the project was started because C++ has severe problems when used at the scale of Google.
The basic design of Go was intended to engineer out the issues that Google developers saw when using C++ at scale for long periods, such as circular references and problems with combining exceptions with concurrency.
What makes Go distinctive is that the team concluded that complexity inherantly does not scale, and designed for simplicity. Which enables Go to scale down in a way, even though it was originally intended as a "systems language".
Kubernetes people had literally reinvented a dynamic language on top of Go, that says something.
https://medium.com/@arschles/go-experience-report-generics-i...