[stouset]

> One of Go's biggest strengths is that anyone can pick up the language and be somewhat productive in it after a week.

This ranks just about at the bottom for any language I care to work with.

"Learning a language" is more than just about being able to write syntactically-correct code. It's about understanding effective design patterns, idioms, the standard library, common pitfalls, writing maintainable code, and so on.

Learning the syntax comprises less than 5% of that effort, and optimizing for that step—particularly at the expense of the other steps—is ill-advised. And in my opinion, go has done precisely this by having tons of sharp edges: nil interface values, race conditions with channels, supposed-"meaningful" zero values, implicit interface implementation, etc. are all sharp edges I've personally run into that have caused bugs in production.