In my experience, that happens when people consciously manage the way they use their language, or have the trained instinct to do so unconsciously. At a certain

In my experience, that happens when people consciously manage the way they use their language, or have the trained instinct to do so unconsciously. At a certain scale choice of language doesn't really influence this all that much (as long as the language isn't Perl I guess, I've never seen that done cleanly.) I've worked on really neat big Scala codebases and really terrible big Go codebases – a determined developer can make a mess regardless of language, and for some cases it's actually easier to end up in that place with Go than with a more expressive language with a more comprehensive stdlib. Go isn't well-equipped for a number of things, and if you have to do those a lot, generated code and workarounds like the pseudo-sets people build from maps really become liabilities. From what I've seen as far as complex codebases are concerned, I'd say Go can be very readable for small-ish programs that lend themselves well to Go's opinionated standard library and way of doing things, but I'd definitely want to use something more expressive at scale or for anything that doesn't fit into Go's limitations well.