arp242 on Go not being an easy language, though it superficially seems such.

As pointed out in the Lobste.rs thread, the "easy-hard" spectrum is not quite the dichotomy that it appears to be. Go makes some things much, much easier (untethered, lightweight concurrency) while also, by its nature of preferring simplicity, requires semantic complexity to express some concepts while doing so performantly, an example being slice manipulation as described in the article. Therefore perhaps it's worth considering what would one mean by Go being "easy"; it's simple by having the core language be succinct, but that doesn't necessarily make it easy to start off with from scratch. (The fact that Go is kind of a "C, take two" doesn't help either—C is also superficially simple but actually requires a deep understanding of how computers actually work before one can begin comprehending it.)

And yet languages such as Python which seem easy by most measures are actually pretty complex, in part because this under-the-water complexity enables it to be seemingly easy. But yet it's hard to do Go-style concurrency in them, in part due to the language being uniquely unsuited for concurrency, and in part due to it not really being provisioned for in the standard library. Green threads etc. help but only for IO-bound tasks, whereas goroutines map onto OS-level threads and therefore are also useful for CPU-bound ones.

An interesting midpoint between the both is Erlang; it's simultaneously pretty simple as a language, has a complex but comparatively easy concurrency story (with resiliency built in!), and yet is also pretty hard to wrap one's head around because its simplicity requires thinking on different terms than most languages (and also giving up most of the imperative control flow to the runtime, which, I suspect, makes some people uncomfortable—me included.)

So I guess my conclusion instead would be that nothing is "easy"; it all depends on both where you're coming from and what you intend to accomplish. It's all tradeoffs, especially within a synthetically constructed system. Some things may be "easier" for some people, but that doesn't (and can't) map universally unto everyone and everything.