[doctor_eval]

I don't know Dart at all, but I used Java from version 1.0, and watched as it morphed and morphed again - from for-loops, to collections with iterators, then "upwards" to list and map comprehensions, closures, function pointers. My younger colleagues were writing code I could barely understand; having left that world several years ago, I still find idiomatic modern Java difficult to mentally map to intent, as you put it. The feature set is undisciplined.

So I completely agree with you. I think it's unfortunate that some people appear to mistake simplicity of construction with simplicity of thought. Go's ingenious simplicity - its elegance - is a virtue. Unfortunately it also reflects what Dijkstra said: "Why has elegance found so little following? ... Elegance has the disadvantage if that's what it is that hard work is needed to achieve it and a good education to appreciate it".

[throw-the-towel]

My experience with Go is quite the opposite. Python may be way slower to run, but it maps to my intent extremely well. In Go, every time you try to find an item in a slice, or convert a slice to a map for faster search, or whatever, one piece of intent turns into a whole paragraph of boilerplate or a completely ad-hoc helper function.

Reading Go feels like legalese.