Go is not really a popular language, simply because a lot of people look to languages like Rust, Zig, or TypeScript for their project or learning. I don't blame them; they're popular for a reason. As my last blog post described, I love Rust after working with it for just a week. I think that's amazing! There's something way more fascinating about Go though, and that is that it is not flashy whatsoever. It's not the hottest language. It doesn't have any "blazingly fast" features (except the concurrency model, but we'll discard that for sake of discussion). It just gets the job done as quick and simply as possible. I value code readability more than anything really - this has gotten me into a lot of arguments - because in my opinion, code is a form of a story. A story guided by strict logic. If you can't follow the story easily, it is a bad story (it may still have one, but is not good).
Go is often compared to Python, which I think is an oversimplification. Maybe it's because I learned to program in Python but I will probably never use it again - it is a nightmare to use now because of the web of dependencies, the weird transition from Python 2 to Python 3, and above all - it's just so complicated for a seemingly simple language. Most people hate it for the formatting, but that is very low on my list. It feels like node_modules as a language. Go is only similar in a few ways to Python, and none of those actually matter (basically just the lack of semicolons). Go is a systems (and, I'd argue web-forward) language that is closer to C than Python. After all, Ken Thompson and Rob Pike helped design it.
To me it feels like the only language with intentional design from the start. I am a big fan of the UNIX philosophy and minimalism and I believe Go is the only language that truly embodies the UNIX philosophy. Very much like the game of Go, it is not complicated yet it can scale into a massive, unique creation using it's simple parts. The fact that I wrote the same amount of code in Go in about 1/8 the time it took to write Rust should say quite a lot about the simplicity of it all. I may enjoy learning programming languages but I have found my lifelong friend, the language I will write most things in: Go.