It is slightly more verbose than well written Python. I think that puts it a good 5x less verbose than the equivalent Java, tho I have not ported any Java to Go

It is slightly more verbose than well written Python. I think that puts it a good 5x less verbose than the equivalent Java, tho I have not ported any Java to Go so YMMV. It is like Python in that it is modern, has a rich set of good libraries to do stuff, a simple method of codes reuse (interfaces rather than dynamic duck typing). You have first class functions so you can write cool call back based Jason transformers or the like. Ten liner Python reformatter is twenty in Go. Still clever and way faster and runs on sixteen or 32 cores with no work, assuming you design the program with the data flow in mind. I have not written many web services, just one gRPC thing which was the typically slow first use of a new framework couple of days work. Mostly I write network shimmies, eg syslog to Kafka or NAT to squid, or else S3 bucket editing utilities.