> I still hold that Go's success is attributed to the fact that you could build a web application out of the box, minus database drivers.
May, partly, sure...
I attribute Go's success due to the simplicity of the language. All successful languages tend to have one thing in common - they are extremely easy to read.
It also has some really unique meta aspects to it which are the appeal for me.
Forget about needing to decide on a web server library because there isn't one in the standard library. With C++ you have to decide which parts of the language itself you're going to use. Trying to learn is incredibly intimidating, because you look up how to do something simple and there's 17 unique answers with a million opinions on which is best, and which will lead you into a nightmare of unmaintainable code.
Go was built on the principle of being incredibly picky regarding what features are added to it. It's best assumed that any new feature that's proposed to be added will never be added, and until it goes through a heavy pitching process and gets hard-earned approval, it won't be there because the language has worked well enough without it up to now.
Having the formatting forced into the source code is genius too. Whether or not I agree with the prettiness of every formatting decision, I'm just happy it's there, because it's less decisions I have to make, and no matter whose code I'm reading, I know it'll be formatted in the same way as everyone else's.
May, partly, sure...
I attribute Go's success due to the simplicity of the language. All successful languages tend to have one thing in common - they are extremely easy to read.