A couple of remarks. FWIW my job is as a Go programmer.

The unused variable thing (particularly with local variables) has caught many bugs quickly for me. If there's a package that I find myself always adding and removing, it's easy to write a function that freezes it. For instance, for the debugging print example:

    func printf(f string, args ...interface{}) {
        log.Printf(f, args...)
    }

(I tend to use log for debugging prints rather than fmt, because it's guaranteed thread-safe, and it's easier to separate debugging prints from necessary prints at a later stage).

On the few occasions that I've really felt I lacked a ternary operator, I've just coded one up for the occasion:

    func either(cond bool, a, b string) string {
        if cond {
           return a
        }
        return b
    }

No big deal. I do find myself writing little functions as building blocks quite a lot, but I think this works well. Functions are a great building block, and Go is great for assembling blocks.