Let's go with "Go is easy if you use an appropriate IDE"
Emacs is great for many things, but Go was clearly designed with GUI IDE tooling in mind. So if you decide to forfeit that huge benefit, of course it'll be a sub-optimal experience.
Emacs is great for many things, but Go was clearly designed with GUI IDE tooling in mind. So if you decide to forfeit that huge benefit, of course it'll be a sub-optimal experience.
Surprisingly not. One of Go's authors commented many times in the early days that Go shouldn't need an IDE, only a text editor. He even commented that syntax highlighting/coloring were unnecessary distractions.
there was talk early in the project about whether Go needed an IDE to succeed. No one on the team had the right skill set, though, so we did not try to create one. However, we did create core libraries for parsing and printing Go code, which soon enabled high-quality plugins for all manner of editor and IDE, and that was a serendipitous success.
Which I read as they considered IDEs important.
https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/
https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/hJHCAaiL0so/m/kG3B...
(and some other stuff about syntax highlighting from around that time (?) I couldn't find.)
So maybe it was a bit of both.
I would like to see what happens if you say this to Rob "syntax highlighting is for children" Pike's face.