Consider e.g. traverse, which is a function you simply can't write in a language without higher-kinded types. Several times I've written half a page of code only to realize "that's just traverse" or "that's just foldMap" or so on. In a less expressive language I would've had to leave that half-page as is. Surely that means the expressiveness results in more readable, less complex code?

More code will be written in COBOL this year alone than has ever been written in Go.

So what? More code has been written in C and Java than Go and Rust and Ocaml and whatever-else combined. A language's popularity says little about its complexity or how good of a language it is.

Powerful languages let you grapple with problems, weak languages first make you grapple with the language before tackling problems. Some people feel like Go gets in the way. I have not written any Go, but I understand both the praise and the criticism.

Powerful languages can cause other issues, but they do enable certain things that weaker languages simply never can.

Do you have a source? I don't find your claim implausible, however I would like to know how you came to that conclusion.

> more code has been written in Go than Haskell, Rust and Ocaml combined.

[Citation needed]

What leads you to believe the same won't happen to Go?

I have seen this happen in C codebases before Java took the enterprise.

Its own little macro based DSL and pointers that were actually handles for the real data.

Exactly because of that I rather use languages that provide the tools to work with complexity, instead of shunning it into the shoulders of developers.

Anyway Go has its use cases, and it is already an improvement if less C code gets written.