> But must its users be this defensive?

Go is to programing what Brutalism is to Architecture. It is striped bare of everything down to the most basic of forms. It is structure is laid bare, put on display and free of decoration.

If you come in and try to write Golang like other languages your going to be unhappy, your going to tell us how go sucks because NPM/PIP/Gems is better (a common lament). It's not defensive rolling up the news paper and wacking new devs to Golang and telling them "don't do it like its java/c/ruby/js/python do it like this..."

Embrace the less is more of Go and it makes more sense and gets much more pleasant.