The vast majority of programs written in those languages are still relatively simple A->B things like grep or ls was when C was new. Go is a much simpler langua

The vast majority of programs written in those languages are still relatively simple A->B things like grep or ls was when C was new. Go is a much simpler language than C# and Java - the GC isn't really the point. Everyone likes to think, I can't use a GC for my work - I don't like garbage collection much either, but this is basically religion: it's just a tool, and it's a tool that makes programming easy.