Most of the "means vs. end" dichotomy occurs at a level above choice of language. Every language permits both beautiful code and ugly code. Every language allows you to optimize. I write Go every day and I strive to write beautiful and performant code, for the sake of writing beautiful and performant code. Go may not allow you express e.g. quicksort as beautifully as in Haskell, but its simplicity and pragmatism lend themselves to a different kind of beauty.