I tried it and was immediately put off by the monumentally dumb approach to package management (or rather: its non-existence), lack of generics and approach to exception handling.

IMHO If go were invented by anybody other than Google it wouldn't have enjoyed anywhere near the success that it did.

I'm usually extra suspicious of "hot" open source technologies with a marketing budget and/or tech behemoth behind them. It's not that they can't be fundamental steps ahead it's that the marketing can end up causing undeserved popularity.

I'm in the camp that actually prefers -- strongly prefers -- Go's style of error handling over exceptions. It's not a perfect language of course, but when you say it's successful only because Google marketed it, I think you're off by quite a lot. Go is popular in part because of the things you hate that other people like. Also, Google hasn't really done any real "marketing" of Go that I can see. They released it with what amounted to enough fanfare to say "Hey, here's a thing. We think it's pretty cool. Here you go."

And the point of Go is that it isn't trying to be "fundamental steps ahead". If anything, Go is an opinionated statement that programming was better in 1992 than it is today, so let's just fix the annoying shit from 1992 and pretend the word "enterprise" had continued to just mean the ship from Star Trek.

I have similar gripes with Go. I really love programming with CSP techniques and Go does a good job of implementing a lot of this at a lower-level. Clojure also draws from CSP and from Go's implementation of CSP, but lacks some of the nice things Go has going on here at lower-levels, however I end preferring Clojure for so many other reasons. I still would not shy away from Go, but it's far from a perfect language and doesn't really improve on a lot of things that similar languages don't do well.

I think it's not just Google, but the cult of Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, etc. I appreciate their work on so many things, so I don't mean any ill-will. I was a user of ACME editor and Plan9, but just like those projects, Go has so many polish issues in critical areas. The package management alone is ridiculous. The common theme in all these projects is for every good idea, there is an order of magnitude more critical mistakes or divisive ideas that cripple the end result in some way.

Go is alright, but it's not really that interesting to me or a monumental leap. There are a few ideas that others could cherry-pick and put into much better designed languages to take it all a step further in my opinion.

Bingo! :)

I'm a 50+ developer who has increasingly felt that "life is too short" to spend all my time trying to keep on the latest fads.

That being said, I have found myself doing more "fun" programming in Go lately, precisely because, as you said, they hit the mark with how simple and clean the language is, with little of the baggage that comes along with a lot of languages and frameworks (I'm looking at you Rails and React) today.

I am a language freak (hard to admit as who is not these days) but have to say I did not try Go yet... so yes, I must.

As a language geek myself, I've been working a lot with Elixir lately at $WORK, which has been an absolute dream. There's pioneer taxes and bug fixes we have to push upstream occasionally to some of our dependencies, but it's been extremely pleasant so far. Clean syntax, well thought out internals, 30 year old host platform designed for server programming, Lisp style macros (it really feels like a Lisp) , an "explicit over implicit" mentality, immutable everything, and a wonderful "Rails without magic" web framework to go along with it.

That almost sounds exactly like the Java argument from the late 90s

clean syntax standard libraries write once, run anyone