You're looking at it from your personal, one-person point of view, but it was made by and for Google, who struggle with tens, hundreds of millions of LOC and thousands of developers whose time is often spent on waiting. There was a post yesterday (I believe) about just that, how a developer in a FAANG managed to do a few tasks at best per week.
How fast you can churn out code in a language becomes completely irrelevant at those scales. How fast you can get to grips with a codebase, make the change, compile it, test it, and have it reviewed is much more important.
And that's where Go comes in; it doesn't have much cleverness so most code is instantly readable. Take a random file from https://github.com/golang/go/tree/master/src and any developer will understand it and be able to make changes. They optimized the language for compile speed (https://stackoverflow.com/a/8673468/204840); the joke goes that they came up with Go while waiting for a compile. And because the code is so simple and standardized, reviewing also takes less time.
I'm mostly thinking of Scala as the direct opposite of Scala which has as many different coding styles as it has developers, and Go's language design process as rebelling against most other languages that seem to want to put other language features in them for the sake of it (I'm still bitter about classes in Javascript and streams in Java).
TL;DR: If you're a solo developer or work in a small team, then Go may not be for you if you're measuring personal productivity. Its value starts to show if you scale up, and you go from churning out code to maintenance mode.
> Go's language design process as rebelling against most other languages that seem to want to put other language features in them for the sake of it
Rob Pike in 2015, about what Go was trying to avoid:
"Java, JavaScript (ECMAScript), Typescript, C#, C++, Hack (PHP), and more [...] actively borrow features from one another. They are converging into a single huge language." [0]
How fast you can churn out code in a language becomes completely irrelevant at those scales. How fast you can get to grips with a codebase, make the change, compile it, test it, and have it reviewed is much more important.
And that's where Go comes in; it doesn't have much cleverness so most code is instantly readable. Take a random file from https://github.com/golang/go/tree/master/src and any developer will understand it and be able to make changes. They optimized the language for compile speed (https://stackoverflow.com/a/8673468/204840); the joke goes that they came up with Go while waiting for a compile. And because the code is so simple and standardized, reviewing also takes less time.
I'm mostly thinking of Scala as the direct opposite of Scala which has as many different coding styles as it has developers, and Go's language design process as rebelling against most other languages that seem to want to put other language features in them for the sake of it (I'm still bitter about classes in Javascript and streams in Java).
TL;DR: If you're a solo developer or work in a small team, then Go may not be for you if you're measuring personal productivity. Its value starts to show if you scale up, and you go from churning out code to maintenance mode.