That simplicity comes at a cost. The cost is duplicate code, less strict error handling and the billion dollar mistake.

In Go, I agree. But that's not necessarily the case for all simple languages. Take ML, for example. It's a very small, easy-to-learn language with excellent abstraction features that make it easy to avoid duplicate code, as well as excellent static checking and error handling.

Unfortunately, ML lacks a comprehensive, modern standard library like Go has.