If I was a business owner, I'd love Go. But what I can't really figure out is why so many devs love it. It's far from the worst thing in the world, I don't hate it, but I just can't get excited over it either.
As someone who writes — I mean prose, whether fiction or not (mostly not: essays, technical, etc) — I had to come to terms quite early with the dichotomy you explain here.
There is a place for the "beautiful language", the parts of it and the ways of using it that make it a pleasure, as a writer and as a reader. This, unsurprisingly, usually demands a whole lot of additional work on top of the 'direct meaning'.
Then there's a place, in casual communication, in business, in marketing, in essays as well, in technical docs, in speeches, in a lot of places, for the 'direct meaning', or close to that. The efficient use of language, when all form recedes in favor of meaning, of concepts, of getting that 'other' to get what you mean.
It's just that, in human language, you do it all with the same tools, we use formal or topical subsets of a vastly larger ensemble. In programming, we're more likely to use different languages [themselves subsets of human language if you think about it, but let's forget that for the sake of simplicity].
And there are programmers among us who love to dabble in the form, like some writers would spend 10%, twice, ten times the effort crafting just "better form" over an already well-defined idea/story. While other programmers, or at other times, just focus on getting things done. Cue the spectrum in-between.
So it all depends what we put in our code, as programmers, as human beings I guess. Is that thing a personal statement? Or is it just garbage code to temporarily expedite some roadblock? How do we approach complexity, bottom-up from the simplest elements/code, or top-down with the most expressive almost-meta entities? Maybe some side-line out-of-the-box angle? See how we'd word all of these, in human languages, as in code. We just wouldn't say the same, nor code (select languages) the same.
I don't know if I explained it well. But looking at it from a human language writer, it all seems clear now. The whole rat race of languages, the churches, the sheer effort put into form when meaning has already been solved 10 times by others, the strong NIH syndromes... it's all so common in traditional writers circles. We're all just writers, really!
The lack of quality batteries included also leads to "there is more than one way to do it" through the choice of unofficial libraries. My experience is that the extensive standard library of Go brings more normalisation.
I think, in order to understand why so many people love Go, you first need to understand why so many people love C.
Go is C with most of the warts removed (for application development). GC, easy strings, maps, easier first-class function syntax, code formatting, modern standard library, easy concurrency, etc.
Yes, there are plenty of places that C can go that Go cannot - operating systems and embedded devices are high up on that list. But for back end application development, it's great as long as your application is of a moderate size and you don't need specialized data structures.
That covers quite a bit of ground.
That is the reason, I like Go so much. It is still a very simple language, but improves in the key parts of memory safety, having a GC, better type checking, and a few high level constructs, most of all having first class functions and closures. These enable many of the features of "higher" programming languages. You can do mapping functions over lists in Go quite fine.
So what part of C is not in the list of warts averted in Go?
A simple language with only a few things to learn. Everything built up from those few things.
1: unless designed by a committee with no such single-minded aim
For those Go would beat anything that lacks convenient green threads (Type Script included, also Java, C#, C++), anything that is dynamically typed, and anything that is interpreted.
It's bit meant to be exciting, it's meant to be effective, efficient, and reliable.
Not sure why business owners should love it either. Not enough features in the language coding productivity suffer in a long run. Also if the developer needs Go because other languages are "too complex" maybe said developer can't produce proper code anyways.
Secondly, C/C++ is like the third or fourth most commonly listed programming language in job listings. If you think all but 2 or 3 languages are niche, that is not what the word means.
Most software problems are not about solving them faster, it’s about combining existing components in new ways and figuring out to orchestrate it all.
I don’t care about copy elision, heap fragmentation, perfect forwarding, when my performance is being lost in the communication between services. What I need is a better architecture and more scaling, not concerning myself with if this loop is being vectorized, or that object is being moved instead of copied, and other minutia which inevitably ends up wasting your time when writing C++.
Niche does not mean "stuff I don't personally use at my job", but that is the only definition under which Typecript is not niche and c++ is. C++ in 2019 had the 4th most job listings according to Indeed. Calling that a niche is absurd especially in comparison to Typescript.
There are also many places which just ask for Java/C++ experience for no apparent reason. Amazon is like this, all of their job listings mention C++ but only a very small percentage of the code base is in C++. There is at least 10 times as much Ruby code and it is part of systems that most engineers will have to work with, but no job application mentions that.