“Go’s design is a disservice to intelligent programmers”

Just because you're intelligent doesn't mean you should spend all that intelligence trying to figure out other people's messes. Simplicity and explicitness are paramount when collaborating.

> Simplicity and explicitness are paramount when collaborating.

So is succinctness (most people can't speed read code). The examples he gives make Go look anything but succinct.

At a certain point succinctness does more harm than good. Go captures nearly all of the sense of python's early values (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/), without requiring all that much more in the way of boilerplate. So you have to if-check an error value here and there, no big deal. You should be handling errors anyway.

If Haskell's succinctness level is 1, then I would rate python's at 2, go's at 4, and java's at 20.

Nonsense. On moderate-large codebases Go is not 5x more expressive/succinct than Java. Maybe 1.5x if you are lucky.