I sort of agree, but this approach has a real problem: you're strongly selecting for people who are at least okay with the language. If you expect all criticism

I sort of agree, but this approach has a real problem: you're strongly selecting for people who are at least okay with the language. If you expect all criticism of Go to come from people who have years of Go experience, all you'll ever get are people who broadly approve of the Go design philosophy, along with the occasional soul that got trapped in a Go job by accident. The sort of people who find major problems in Go simply won't put time and energy into the language beyond a point—why should they? There's a limit to how far I'm going to explore a tool that seems obviously inferior, even if the tool is popular. (And popularity is an absolutely terrible measure of quality!) If you applied this standard to PHP, you'd get an implausibly rosy view of the language, because the people who aren't invested in it simply don't use it.