I mean, what language got everything exactly right from day 0? Yes, Go started from a minimalist position, but that’s been a wildly successful decision—Go lacks a lot of the cruft of other languages. Go is an easily understandable language, it compiles super quickly, it has top notch tooling (e.g., compiling almost any Go project on any system with ‘go build’ and even cross compile by changing a couple of env vars), it compiles to relatively small[^1] static binaries by default, and it does all of this with pretty good performance.
[^1]: Someone is going to come in with some rant about how big a “hello world” binary is compared to C, as if this is emblematic of some real-world use case.
A cynical view is that 80% of Go's success is a result of the excellent tooling, and the fact that it's associated for and pushed by Google, while the underlying language is "mediocre" at best.
In theory I agree with Go's minimalist perspective, it just also feels inconsistent, and like they made a whole lot of bad decisions along the way. Favoring C-style enums over proper sum-types is one of the biggest one, and ties into Go's error handling, which continues to be a major talking point.
I fully agree with the enums thing—that’s by far my biggest gripe with the language. But even still, I can be a lot more productive in Go than I can in any other mainstream language, including languages that have sum types (Rust, OCaml, etc) which isn’t to say sum types make me less productive but rather that those languages have other productivity issues that outweigh the benefits afforded by sum types. Basically, Go gets a whole lot of little things right that most languages miss, but everyone fixates on “generics” and “sum types” which are, overall, quite small things IMHO.
Is the excellent tooling not also a property of a minimal language? Lisp has the "least" syntax/semantics and the best tooling, because it's so easy to write tools. Go has more complex syntax/semantics, but still much easier to wrangle e.g. control flow out of an AST, compared to other Algol derivatives.
[^1]: Someone is going to come in with some rant about how big a “hello world” binary is compared to C, as if this is emblematic of some real-world use case.