While there is a nugget of truth in your statements, the generalisations are so excessive that the overall point is completely wrong.

Lets take a few statements:

> Most people who rewrote their apps from X to Go and saw improved performance and readability benefited much more from the rewrite than they did from Go.

Yes, the rewrite would certainly have helped. However some compilers and runtimes are just faster than others. You wouldn't say that rewriting C code in Perl would result in faster code would you? Of course not. But that's the implication of your post. Go does outperform some languages. Granted it's still slower than some others out there, but not all languages are equal in terms of performance so it's pretty naive to imply they are.

> At best, the fact that Go has a relatively weak ecosystem, means that they had to write from scratch a lot of things they were getting for free in X. But, because in X is was a library, they only used 5% of the features, but paid a high performance cost and had a complex API to work with.

That's completely rubbish. Go is a young language, that much is true. But it's ecosystem is actually very impressive given it's age. Since you're talking about web development, lets look at all the libraries you might want:

x SQL / no-SQL databases: check;
x compression: check;
x hashing / encryption: check;
x image manipulation: check;
x monitoring (eg New Relic): check;
x httpd frameworks: check;
x html templating: check;
x smtp (sending e-mails): check;
x JSON / XML: check;
x web sockets: check;

I've no doubt missed some stuff that you probably use, but that's not a reflection of stuff missing from Go either. The fact is, in all practicality, there isn't much you need to rewrite in Go aside the web application itself.

> Go's a good language for some things. But it does nothing special or significant to close the massive productivity gap between dynamic and static language. Yes, it's terse compared to many other static language and it has stuff like implicit interfaces, but those are superficial (but nice) things when it comes to what and how you do things in dynamic land.

This sounds more like a rant about how much you hate statically typed languages than it does about how poor Go is compared to [insert preferred language]. For what it's worth, statically typed languages do also offer some productivity bonuses over dynamically typed languages: a big one being the fussier compiler / runtime checking can pick up subtle bugs (eg 0 / "0" / false) that might otherwise take a little while to trace. And I am aware that some dynamic languages have typed checking operators, eg ===, but you can't always guarantee what you're libraries are going to handle / return so you're still sometimes left tracing values up the code base to find the origin of the problem rather than having the compiler explicitly tell you at the first point where your uncleansed data arrives.

So there are also advantages with going down the statically typed route.

> But for a traditional web app / service? It's horrible. At least as horrible as most static languages.

Sorry, but now you're just descending into unashamed language bigotry. A large proportion of the worlds cloud services are supported by statically typed platforms such as ASP.NET, Java, and Go. This forum, HN, is written in Haskell, which is also statically typed. Saying "most static languages [are] cumbersome, error prone, slow, inflexible and difficult to test." is so far off the mark that it's just plain ignorant.

Which is a real pity as there would have been a few good points raised in your rant if you hadn't have jumped off in the deep end with your ridiculous generalisations.