“Go says it doesn’t have exceptions. Go makes it extremely awkward to use exceptions, because they want to punish programmers who use them.”
Habets lays out the case against Go with surgical precision. Two kinds of nil that don’t equal each other. Silent data loss on non-UTF-8 strings. Append with undefined ownership semantics. The language designers made opinionated choices about simplicity, then built a standard library that violates those opinions. The result is a language that punishes you for using its features while forcing you to write exception-safe code without exceptions. Google got exactly what they wanted. Everyone else got stuck with it.