Are you sure you're not confusing Go with some other language?
> daunting!
Go is often praised for being simple.
> modern!
...and criticized for being too simple, ignoring modern advances in programming language research.
> no compiler OMG!
The compiler and its careful tradeoff between fast compilation and fast programs is a key characteristic of Go.
> text transformation on the code itself!
Go doesn't have macros. Instead people fall back on code generation, just like Java.
