I've been on both sides of the fence here - I've bounced between two camps:
1. Go with a better type system. A compiled language, that has sum types, no-nil, and generics.
2. A widely used, production, systems language that implements PL-theory up until the year ~2000. (Effects, as described in this article, was a research topic in 1999).
I started with (1), but as I started to get more and more exposed to (2), you start looking back on times when you fought with the type system and how some of these PL-nerds have a point. I think my first foray into Higher-Kinded Types was trying to rewrite a dynamic python dispatch system into Rust while keeping types at compile time.
The problem is, many of these PL-nerd concepts are rare and kind of hard to grok at first, and I can easily see them scaring people off from the language. However I think once you understand how they work, and the PL-nerds dumb down the language, I think most people will come around to them. Concepts like "sum types" and "monads", are IMO easy to understand concepts with dumb names, and even more complex standard definitions.
Yeah, (non sarcastically) give those things dumb names like borrow checker and you'll get people swooning over it.
> 1. Go with a better type system. A compiled language, that has sum types, no-nil, and generics.
I was looking for something like that and eventually found Crystal (https://crystal-lang.org) as a closest match: LLVM compiled, strong static typing with explicit nulls and very good type inference, stackfull coroutines, channels etc.
Crystal is a typed Ruby. The closer to Go language would probably be Odin.
Odin is more of an alternative C than Go. V is inspired by Go has like nearly the same syntax as Go and alot of Goodies. Like Error Types, Sum Types and more.
Crystal’s syntax is similar to Ruby’s, but AFAIK the similarity more-or-less ends there.