If you think lack of features is a knock against Go, you aren't really in the right mindset (Go might just not be for you). The lack of remarkable features is

If you think lack of features is a knock against Go, you aren't really in the right mindset (Go might just not be for you). The lack of remarkable features is what is remarkable. The same with heavily built web-frameworks versus like Gorilla (a series of take it or leave tools). Scala has every feature and language construct under the sun and full access to the astounding landscape of Java -- as well as amazing tools like Akka. This is all wonderful, and I enjoy using Scala because it is rich and you can treat is very functionally. That said, I now prefer Go to it after shipping two production products on it. A deploy that is second to none, amazingly fast development cycles, easy to build rich custom tools on top of it (for example go-diff, which ignores syntax differences and only shows functional differences), the easiest cross compilation I have ever used, and a focus on this exceptional clear and easy to read code (lack of implicitness / magic). It reminds me a lot of what I like about Erlang -- with some of the more annoying bits stripped away. But, at the end of the day I am using Go for three reasons: 1) Lets me get work done quicker than other languages (and win contracts / beat competition) 2) I can keep the entire spec (50 pages) in my head, with very little time spent. I have used Scala far longer, but would never make such a claim about it. 3) The tool chain (build, cross-compile, test, format, doc) that comes with it is amazing, the least obnoxious I have ever used. It has warts (get), but all in all -- it makes using anything else exceptionally painful. Once you get used to "go test ./... && go install ./..." to build your app and put it in ./bin -- and you get used to doing deploys with "scp bin/foo server..." everything else starts to feel stupid.