The author's didn't come out against it; they came out in favor of using it as a programming language first and foremost. Tools like gorun https://github.com/erning/gorun have existing for almost as long as Go has, so if you want to use Go that way, it is easy to do. They recently added in support to do this: go run github.com/kardianos/json/cmd/jsondiff@v1.0.1 Which pulls a tag and runs it directly, which is also kinda cool.