I did not say that golang apps require five times the amount of code as projects in other languages, I said that I need to read five times the amount of code to

I did not say that golang apps require five times the amount of code as projects in other languages, I said that I need to read five times the amount of code to understand the high-level task that's being performed. And I would say I need to spend an equivalent amount of time processing and understanding the code that was being read. That is a real, serious cost when talking about maintenance. The loop verbosity thing was just single obvious example and it's good that golang has finally gotten iterators (though their design is… weird IMO). But it's also only one of many, many issues underlying why go code is much more tedious to comprehend than code written in other HLLs.