I'm just getting into Go and have found what you said to be true. It's easy to read other people's code on GH (Java is much the same way). Compare that to something like Scala, where no ones code looks the same.

I'd like to echo what you said. I tend to be a victim of analysis paralysis, spending hours thinking up the most clever design. Go offers far fewer alternatives so there goes the temptation. Given a smallish task, I simply sit down and grind out code, and a couple of thousand lines later I have a simple, self-contained executable that does what I wanted to do. I feel there's a kind of magic in Go's brute simplicity.

Check out sourcegraph, it's great for reading Go and Java code and has a GitHub integration.

Honestly the biggest thing go has going for it is gofmt. Its one of the few things I miss when I work with other languages.

Doesn't every semi-decent IDE have an option to reformat your code? What makes gofmt so special?

That all code is written the same from the get-go, and you can readily browse it in places like github, etc.

No external choices the language dictates style. It ships with the sdk & contributors are expected to use it so there is a cultural agreement out of the box. It's a cli tool so it's immensely scriptable and easy to integrate.

I think it may actually be the thing I miss the most. (together with implicit interfaces)