This post resonates. I recently built a little web service to scratch an itch I've been having and after discussing the options with Claude we settled on Go, and honestly it's been fantastic. Highly performant, native threading, dead simple to deploy with containers. And I don't even know how to read or write Go.
Go is fun, you should actually learn it
Oh man... I like go because it is compiled, performant, strong and statically typed. But "fun" is not something I would say about it. The ergonomics of error handling, lack of ternary operator and other stuff that compiled 30yo languages already had ...
That sort of syntactic sugar goes against the Go philosophy. Don't get me wrong, I share your frustration, but I also see the value of consistency in their philosophy.
I'm starting to think all these languages having their own pet "philosophies" that is "totally better than X" is a shitshow and just personal preference masquerading as standards.
Go is less a language than a philosophy. It was an angry reaction to 10,000 ways to do things, and overly clever (ahem, expressive) syntactic sugar.
It is quite boring to write, but very easy to read.
Not a Go fanatic. I use Go and various other languages, and was a decade and a half late to the Go party anyway. Just trying to explain the outlook.
I did go through the Go tutorial many many years ago, but it's been so long I don't remember anything. I do remember it was an enjoyable process though, and I'd love to pick it up again.