A major reason, in my opinion, is that Go addressed an actual need. And that is providing an imperative, GCed language with native compilation. We've seen some

A major reason, in my opinion, is that Go addressed an actual need. And that is providing an imperative, GCed language with native compilation. We've seen some more languages that cover this particular niche in recent years, but they aren't yet mature and/or lack backing. The biggest problem here is garbage collection. Garbage collection (or other forms of automatic memory management) has traditionally been necessary for functional languages and (as a matter of practicality) popular for interpreters and JIT-compiled languages, but has often encountered hostility and rejection among users of imperative, natively compiled languages. Go was simply one of the first languages to hit that niche and reach a sufficient level of maturity. Putting up with Go's idiosyncrasies then became simply a tradeoff.