I agree. I don't understand why the designers wouldn't want the language to be expressive. Wouldn't it be better to have an expressive language with conventions than one that's as rigid as it is today?
In C++ there could be 7 or 8 different ways go about implementing similar functionality. This is powerful in that it lets you do exactly what you want because each of those ways is subtly different and sometimes you need each one.
Go's proponents think it's okay to be a bit less powerful so that there is only 1 maybe 2 ways to do something. This makes code at different companies more similar.
It also mean that a new grad can join the team, read the code, copy it, modify it some, and it's pretty much right. A staff SWE and a new grad will right very similar code in Go. In C++ it's anyone's guess how similar their code will be.
Ruby is all about conventions, most Ruby, and by extension Ruby on Rails apps look pretty similar despite the fact that the language is extremely expressive.
I don't buy that a staff SWE and a new grad will write very similar code in Go.
As far as simple language. It is possible to design simple languages that are very expressive, Lisp and Erlang come to mind.
