I accept that Go is more verbose than Python, but your maintainability claim doesn’t match my experience at all. I find that Go is more maintainable for a few reasons: magic is discouraged in Go, everyone writes Go in pretty much the same way and with the same style, Python’s type system is still very immature (no recursive types, doesn’t play nicely with magical libs). Further, in my experience with working with large Python and Go codebases, Python becomes less maintainable very quickly as code size increases, especially in the face of more junior developers. Go seems to be more resistant to these forces, probably because of the rails it imposes. Lastly, any maintainability advantages Python might have had are quickly eaten up by the optimizations, which are necessary in a much greater portion of the code base because naive Python is so much slower than naive Go.

Go is ~100X faster than Python and about half as fast as C/C++/Rust, and I find it to be at least as maintainable as Python for most (but not all!) applications.

As for your power law claim, I agree with the premise but not the conclusion—-“rewrite the hotpath in C!” is not a panacea. This only works when you’re getting enough perf gain out of the C code to justify the marshaling overhead (and of course the new maintenance burden).

I don’t like bashing on Python, but it doesn’t compete well with Go on these grounds. It needs to improve, and we can’t fix it by making dubious claims about Go. We should push to improve things like Pypy and MyPy, as well as other tooling and improvements.