Simple languages are great, but simple does not necessarily mean less powerful. C is a simple language (albeit with many footguns) and the ecosystem is simple a

Simple languages are great, but simple does not necessarily mean less powerful. C is a simple language (albeit with many footguns) and the ecosystem is simple as possible (make and friends, gcc/clang, etc), but it can be extremely difficult. Swift is a great example of what go could be. It includes a lot of powerful features (e.g. generics, lacking in Go), but the language is designed so that its easy to start without having to learn advanced language features; one can slowly accumulate these more advanced tools as one progresses. Scala is also like this; a lot of Scala code is basically just less verbose Java. This is in stark contrast to languages like Haskell or Rust, which one has to very quickly learn myriad details about things to be productive (e.g. about laziness and the data / typeclass split in Haskell compared to standard OO, or about the borrow checker in Rust). Arguably these "big brain languages for super geniuses" distinguish themselves by these features, but it inherently makes them less simple. It's certainly a boon to everyone (including "supergeniuses") that Go has its design for the same reason Python has its design: simplicity begets a great ecosystem. I still use Python all the time because despite its mess of packaging, dynamic typing, and painfully slow execution, there are so many great projects. Go also produces great tools that I enjoy every day (e.g. hugo and kubernetes) and I'm thankful that the language enabled folks to write these applications that run super fast and don't crash because some rarely-exercised code path referred to an undefined object attribute.