I agree with much of what you said, but an expressive type system isn't just a safety mechanism. It's also a tool to write fast code productively. Without compi

I agree with much of what you said, but an expressive type system isn't just a safety mechanism. It's also a tool to write fast code productively. Without compile time metaprogramming some things will always be either extremely resource hungry or extremely repetitive. It's absolutely true that there is always a trade-off. Metaprogramming makes code more difficult to understand and hence more prone to certain types of errors. That's true for runtime metaprogramming as well though. So if the lack of generics leads to an overuse of reflection (or worse to custom code generators) then the complexity you avoided in the language is re-introduced through the backdoor. At the end of the day I think it's about the culture that gets established around a language. Go's creators are trying really hard to socially engineer a culture of simplicity, and that's laudable. But it reminds me of the early days of Java even though the Go community would rather have me think of C. The big difference: C had compile time metaprogramming from the beginning, Java did not. Look which one turned out to be the simpler ecosystem in the end.