Comment by jact

It certainly isn’t impossible to write good code in Go. Perhaps the code base I was working on was bad — it didn’t seem obvious to me that it was. Go is not a bad language in the way that brainfuck is a bad language.

I think Java and C# offer clearly more straightforward ways to extend and modify existing code. Maybe the primary ways extension in Java and C# works are not quite the right ones for every situation.

The primary skill necessary to write modular code is first knowing what the modular interfaces is and second being able to implement it in a clean fashion. Go does offer a form of interfaces. But precisely because it encourages you to be highly explicit and avoid abstraction, it can make it difficult for you to implement the right abstraction and therefore complicate the modular interfaces.

Programming is hard. I don’t think adopting a kind of ascetic language like Go makes programming easier overall. Maybe it’s harder to be an architecture astronaut in Go, but only by eliminating entire classes of abstraction that are sometimes just necessary. Sometimes, inheritance is the right abstraction. Sometimes, you really need highly generic and polymorphic code (see some of the other comments for issues with Go’s implementation of generics).