people hate Go because Go is unapologetically designed from the framing of programmers being members of a labor class having differing levels of expertise. It's not the design itself; it's the design goals themselves that people are opposed to.

This Rob Pike quote gets bandied around in these discussions:

> The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt.

Ten years ago when I learned Go at the Recurse Center, I was early in my career and I picked Go as my language of study because I believed it was a good bet for my career prospects. I said to myself "I bet this is the next Java, and I bet that people who learned Java very early did very well for themselves". This bet proved correct; Go has been enormously useful to me in my career. Many people who go to RC pick languages like Haskell or a Lisp instead; things that are more interesting and challenging. While Haskell is well known for being mentally stimulating and very enriching, it is also well known for not seeing much industry adoption. You can sub a handful of other languages here, but basically just think of any very beautiful cutting edge experimental language that doesn't have a lot of industry jobs. I'm stick to Haskell for consistency in this post but you could just as easily say Lisp or Scala or arguably Rust these days; it's not about a specific language, it's about a specific grouping of languages that prioritize the beauty of the language and the effectiveness of the solo developer.

People get upset at Pike's framing that Go should be learnable by people with less-than-expert experience. As a person sees technology's ability to serve as a vehicle of class mobility, I see this as a great and noble design goal, because I think class mobility is fundamentally good. Ask yourself this: why do people consider it bad that a language acknowledge that it should help not only people with lots of experience, but also people with very little experience, and teams with mixed levels of experience?

My experience of programming Go for ten years and for being in these spaces for that time frame is that criticism of Go almost uniformly comes from people who can afford to invest heavily in things that have a low expected ROI; great and beautiful languages that don't have a lot of job prospects. Most people on Earth cannot afford the time commitment it takes to learn programming at all, let alone learning aspects of programming that they can't monetize.

I have never met a Go programmer that is bothered by the existence of Haskell. I have met many, many Haskell programmers that are bothered by the existence of Go. Ask yourself why that is. Ask yourself why someone would be so angry about something so wildly successful and useful to people. It's not even remotely a two-way street; the hatred goes one way.

This leaves us with the final problem: why can't people acknowledge that different people have different goals, and that those people's goals are just as legitimate as their own? Why are other people's goals threatening? It's because the existence of Go and the massive success of Go causes people to confront some aspect of class consciousness. It is impossible to witness the enormous success of Go and not confront the idea that programmers are laborers, and for some people, the idea of being a member of the labor class is simply not acceptable; criticizing Go thus becomes not merely an act of design criticism, but also as vehicle through which the critic can express something about their own socioeconomic class. There are many valid criticisms of Go, but there is also a category of Go criticism that exists more as a form of class signaling than anything else, and in these public forums, those two forms of criticism often get entangled in complex and opaque ways.