Pike's point is that peak PLT is too lofty to be productive or even useful for folks who are actually technically competent and literate relative to the rest of the industry. No one will get anything done if they're spending all their time teasing an advanced type system into inferring the required program.

Mind showing us the source for that?

Go wasn't made for incompetent developers. I'm fairly certain that people who land a job as devs at Google are pretty competent.

Go was made to facilitate rapid onboarding, easy digestion of large codebases, and working efficiently in large teams where people are guaranteed to have widely different educational backgrounds, experiences and ideas about programming.

That's why the language has to be simple, obvious, and be focused on readability. That's also why Go is strongly opinionated.

And how well did that work out for Haskell?

https://gist.github.com/graninas/22ab535d2913311e47a742c70f1...

Just because one person thinks Functional Programming is the right way to do it, doesn't mean another person has to agree. The same goes for every paradigm, and language feature under the sun. Different people want different things, different projects have different needs.

No single language gets everything right, no single paradigm solves every problem, no feature is a "must have" in every language. A functional approach might be great or a productivity killer depending on the use case. A GC may be the best thing in the world or a performance nightmare. OOP may be a really good idea or a path to unmaintainable crap depending on the implementation.

There are no silver bullets.

The only thing that is ABSOLUTELY certain: When people get told "Our way is better, you should use our way", despite the fact that there are no silver bullets, people will resist. And that resistance can lead to languages vanishing into obscurity.