I would say good tooling really lowers the barrier of entry for these things. Things like good editor integrations (such as being able to see the type under the cursor, or highlight errors inline) and a package manager make things a million times easier for a developer to get started on this. I'm not entirely sure how to do the package management , as that's kind of a religious argument, but it's relatively easy to make basic Vim/NeoVim, Emacs, or Atom integrations, which I think would make a lot more people be willing to check it out.

I am nearly positive that the tooling that came with Go is a pretty big reason for its success.