> Go wins because it's generally simple and consistent. People like simplicity rather than kitchen-sink languages.

Rust often gets accused of being a "kitchen sink" language, but the Rust folks have tried doing the simple thing and it came with severe limitations - Rust 0.x was pretty much indistinguishable from a glorified Go. It even had green threads and GC!

It's no coincidence that they, much like Go, provide a test framework, build system, dependency management, CI, code formatting etc. out of the box. Because these things meaningfully improve productivity.

> Rust often gets accused of being a "kitchen sink" language, but the Rust folks have tried doing the simple thing and it came with severe limitations - Rust 0.x was pretty much indistinguishable from a glorified Go. It even had green threads and GC!

Rust is certainly a big language, but its features work together toward a coherent philosophy/paradigm, so it isn't really what I think of as a "kitchen-sink language". C++, Java, C#, etc have accumulated features from different languages and paradigms based on what was fashionable at the time rather than based on an overarching philosophy or paradigm.

That said, it isn't that Rust's "bigness" absolved it from limitations--it just opted for different limitations: notably a less productive programming model. That tradeoff makes sense in the context of Rust's charter--to be a maximize for safety and performance--but it's not an optimal tradeoff for general purpose software development (at least not as it exists today where productivity is king).

> It's no coincidence that they, much like Go, provide a test framework, build system, dependency management, CI, code formatting etc. out of the box. Because these things meaningfully improve productivity.

Agreed. I think Rust gets a lot of tooling and ecosystem stuff right (because these don't require it to compromise on its charter).

I don't know if it's that people like simplicity as much as simple things should be done simply. If I'm in C and I want some user input and I want to concatenate that input to another string, I have four hours minimum research ahead of me to not add a terrible vulnerability to my application right off the bat. User input should be simple in the simple case with complexity hidden behind weird toggles.

Git is great with this. You can get by just fine in 99% of cases with git add, commit, and push and those three could be explained even to a child. However, you can also fine-tune your pipeline just the way you like with Git's endless tweaks.