Are you sure you're not confusing Go with some other language?
> daunting!
Go is often praised for being simple.
> modern!
...and criticized for being too simple, ignoring modern advances in programming language research.
> no compiler OMG!
The compiler and its careful tradeoff between fast compilation and fast programs is a key characteristic of Go.
> text transformation on the code itself!
Go doesn't have macros. Instead people fall back on code generation, just like Java.
All that Go delivers today, over the medium, is very similar to what perl also delivered yesteryear, on top of yesteryear medium. But also like perl, it is being born from a bunch of old unix system engineers :)