> It seems to be more about the person trying out the language than the language itself.
This is true, but Go does have a clean and mostly familiar syntax, by design: you can mostly follow along with a piece of Go code even if you haven't learned the language.
I think that what the OP is pointing at is a related issue: readability. This is explicitly a high-priority design goal for Go: lots of things in the language are designed so that developers can easily read and understand the code in the projects that they work on, and that memory use is never hidden.
On the flip side, I personally find go extremely difficult to read.
First, repetitive error handling makes it overly tedious to actually get a quick intuition for what a function is doing. With Rust as a comparison, it’s extremely easy to see what the happy path is trying to accomplish without having the downsides of arbitrary and unexpected exceptions. Go is inarguably worse here.
Second, the inability to express higher-level concepts (due to, yes, lack of genetics) seems like it forces every function to deal with the nitty-gritty details of whatever it’s trying to accomplish, rather than being able to express ideas at a higher level and deal with the specifics in smaller code units. Yes, you don’t get “surprising” behavior, but the cost of this is that you’re forced to keep both the high level goals and the low level details in your head simultaneously, which I find to be a massive hindrance.
As sort of a side effect of both of these, there ends up being a ton of repetitive boilerplate. This actually hides bugs since it’s easy to miss minor differences between overly similar blocks of code dealing with errors or looping. As an example, languages like Rust and Ruby that have proper functional-style iterator methods prevent so many bugs through their inclusion it’s absolutely baffling to me how someone would opt to design a language today without such things.
This is true, but Go does have a clean and mostly familiar syntax, by design: you can mostly follow along with a piece of Go code even if you haven't learned the language.
I think that what the OP is pointing at is a related issue: readability. This is explicitly a high-priority design goal for Go: lots of things in the language are designed so that developers can easily read and understand the code in the projects that they work on, and that memory use is never hidden.