Apart from the, I feel, quite pretentious and lazy Rob Pike quote. The productivity in this case is probably referring to the initial period rather than the steady state afterwards (so to speak).
Go is a fairly horrible language by today's standards, but it does what it's supposed to. I like generating code automatically at compile time based on, but I can appreciate the appeal of something that forces you to actually do work rather than being clever.
There’s also a lot outside of the language—tooling, ecosystem, etc that Go absolutely nails; however, these things are tremendously undervalued. You have people in this thread talking about how awful Go is for using “//go:” instead of #pragma as though this sort of concern dominated the software development process.
Go is a fairly horrible language by today's standards, but it does what it's supposed to. I like generating code automatically at compile time based on, but I can appreciate the appeal of something that forces you to actually do work rather than being clever.