Surprisingly, I think we're actually mostly in agreement here, so there's not much to reply to. I think the only real takeaway is that we don't agree on the conclusions to draw.

> On Go hate - it's simple. It has reached quite some time ago the critical adoption rate where it will be made work in the domains it is applied to regardless of its merits (hello a post on HN describing the woes of a company investing millions in tooling to undo the damage done by bolting in NILs and their unsoudness so tightly). It has serious hype and marketing behind it, because other languages are either perceived as Java-kind-of-uncool, or are not noticed, or bundled, again, with Java, like C#. And developers, who have a rift where their knowledge of asynchronous and concurrent programming should be, stop reading at "async/await means no thread blocky" and never learn to appreciate the power and flexibility task/future-based system gives (and how much less ceremony it needs compared to channels or manually scheduled threads, green or not).

I agree that bolting on nil checking to Go is pretty much an admission that the language design has issues. That said, of course it does. You can't eat your cake and have it too, and the Go designers choose to keep the cake more often than not. To properly avoid nil, the Go language would've needed to adopt probably something like sum types and pattern matching. To be honest, that may have been better if they did, but also, it doesn't come at literally no language complexity cost, and the way Go is incredibly careful about that is a major part of what makes it uniquely appealing to begin with.

Meanwhile while Go gets nil checkers, JavaScript gets TypeScript, which I think really puts into perspective how relatively minor the problems Go has actually are.

> Just look at https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/. Go has won, it pays well, it gets "interesting and novel projects" - it does not need your help. Hating it is correct, because it is both more popular and worse (sometimes catastrophically so) at what other languages do.

I gotta say, I basically despise this mentality. This basically reads somewhere along the lines of, "How come Go gets all of the success and attention when other programming languages deserve it more?" To me that just sounds immature. I never thought this way when Go was relatively niche. People certainly use Python, JavaScript, and C++ in cases where they are far from the best tool for the job, but despite all of those languages being vastly more popular than Go, none of them enjoy the reputation of being talked about as the only programming language in history with no redeeming qualities.

People generally use Go (or whatever their favorite programming language is) for things because they know it and feel productive in it, not to spite C# proponents by choosing Go in a use case that C# might do better, or anything like that.

But if you want to think this way, then I can't stop you. I can only hope that some day it is apparent how this is not a very rational or productive approach to programming language debates.

Unfortunately, even though I'm sure it definitely plays no small part, I can't really assume that Go's popularity plays into any person's hatred of it, because flat-out, that would feel like a bad-faith assumption to make...