I'm a Python guy, and there's something in this, I think. One of Python's underrated virtues is how uncontroversial a lot of Python idioms are. The "only one way to do it" attitude helps there.
In my (limited, biased) experience, there's three camps among the Python community:
1. people who want principle-of-least-surprise: there's a lot to be said for boring languages (if the language is the most interesting thing about your product...). Often the systems engineering/service engineering crowd.
2. people who want it to be more functional – the Haskell/Scala/ML crowd. (I guess the overlap between camp 1 and camp 2 is Erlang...)
3. people who want access to the library ecosystem, particularly the Numpy/Scipy/Pandas/Theano stack (the scientific community, latterly data scientists). This is my tribe.
So you've got three crowds here, at least, unified by a language. Where are they going to head?
Go has nothing for the second crowd; they're all going to go to a purer FP language sooner or later. It doesn't have much for the third (no IPython, LAPACK bindings, Fortran bindings, stats libraries, machine learning, etc...); we all have an eye on Julia. But for the first: great deployment story, small language, decent standard libraries, markedly better performance than Python, much better parallelism story...
As someone else noted below, it's also like "static typing lite." It has most of the advantages of static typing with much less of the bookkeeping involved.
ML-style languages go much further with this, while also having richer type systems that both let you write code more easily and do more compile-time safety verifications.
In my (limited, biased) experience, there's three camps among the Python community:
1. people who want principle-of-least-surprise: there's a lot to be said for boring languages (if the language is the most interesting thing about your product...). Often the systems engineering/service engineering crowd.
2. people who want it to be more functional – the Haskell/Scala/ML crowd. (I guess the overlap between camp 1 and camp 2 is Erlang...)
3. people who want access to the library ecosystem, particularly the Numpy/Scipy/Pandas/Theano stack (the scientific community, latterly data scientists). This is my tribe.
So you've got three crowds here, at least, unified by a language. Where are they going to head?
Go has nothing for the second crowd; they're all going to go to a purer FP language sooner or later. It doesn't have much for the third (no IPython, LAPACK bindings, Fortran bindings, stats libraries, machine learning, etc...); we all have an eye on Julia. But for the first: great deployment story, small language, decent standard libraries, markedly better performance than Python, much better parallelism story...