True, the author doesn't really address "effort to get shit done", but Others have commented on this and there seems to be consensus around "Go is a very human readable/writable language".
Anyone know of a human read/write-ability comparison of programming languages?
Isn't that a useless comparison? Chinese, Tamil and Estonian are all extremely human read/writeable, so much that children can write them. However, it's likely at least one of them is indecipherable to you.
Perhaps the metric you're more interested in is the difficulty in learning to read/write decent code in a particular language. Of course, this difficulty can vary based on what other languages the learner is already familiar with.
Chinese is often even indecipherable to the Chinese and because of this there have been many attempts to simplify it.
There is a subset that people actually use and the rest is avoided.
This is a similar case with languages like C++, Ruby and Python. The languages are terrifyingly complex, but the subset that most people use is reasonably usable.
If you stray outside this subset there be dragons.
I see your point about C++, but I don't think anything in Ruby or Python could be described as "terrifyingly complex". They give you plenty of rope to hang yourself in various ways, but that's a different issue than language complexity.
Anyone know of a human read/write-ability comparison of programming languages?