A lot of the verbosity in Go comes from error handling; the language forces you to deal with errors (I think it's a good thing, some may disagree). Expressiveness is real, 'duck typing' does give it a feel of scripting language like Python, and it is way less verbose than Java (apart from error handling). And to be fair, Go is faster than Python (the numbers tell you that), and (slightly?) more expressive than C --and just in a league of its own for concurrency.