I think it’s for different reasons. Go as a language is just fine, but Go as a framework for building software is just fantastic. The tooling is comprehensive and easy to use, testing is built in, and the happy path is almost always highlighted for you. No need to figure out which documentation generator, style guideline/formatter, test framework, build system, package manager, etc to use and these are easy to use (with the notable exception of package management, which has been rocky but is improving). Lisp is a neat and powerful little language but the tooling and documentation are often lacking and it’s often difficult to figure out even which lisp is right for your project.
The debugger isn’t great. Most things just work, and they just work well for the most popular use cases. Documentation is just comments—no special syntax to memorize and no need to maintain infrastructure to parse docstrings and publish to a web server. It also runs the examples to make sure they work. The build system doesn’t require you to learn a special (typically imperative) project configuration language or Makefile generator. It also outputs a statically-linked binary by default—no VMs or interpreters or libraries to shop separately. Although it doesn’t have a comprehensive assertion suite, Go ships with a unit test framework that just works, which is more than can be said for most languages. And all of these things are standard so you can pretty much jump into any project and build it, run its test suite, and begin contributing with little more than a text editor and the Go toolchain. So yeah, Go’s tooling is simply fantastic and no other mainstream language except Rust comes close. This isn’t a fanboy statement; there are lots of other factors to consider, but Go’s tooling is top notch.
