I’ve been mass-mass-mass-mass-defended on Reddit for three years.
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Whenever someone complained that Go was too simple, a bigger question came up: In a world where programming languages are often praised for being complicated, what good things might simpler tools give us? This question led me to write long posts about how limits can spark creativity, how critics missed what real engineering is, and why Go was actually a clever language.
Then I interviewed a large number of Go developers.
Hundreds of them. Across multiple companies. Over eighteen months.
What I found out changed how I felt about Go.
The Interview That Started My Spiral
Senior Go developer. Four years of production experience. Worked at a company you’ve definitely heard of.
I asked him to implement a basic rate limiter.
Not distributed. Not fancy. Just a simple token bucket. Something you’d sketch in an hour.
He froze.
Forty-seven minutes of staring at his screen. When he finally typed something, it didn’t compile. He’d forgotten how to initialize a struct with…