&gt; Docker does not make anything crossplatform; it just enables you to package your dependencies such that you can easily run on any other linux-amd64 machine.<p>Which IS the primary use case for nearly all of Go&#x27;s interesting use cases. The exceptions are CLIs for API access? But you&#x27;re going to have some trickiness with testing in these cases that warrant a non-trivial build-test cycle anyways. If that works well for you that&#x27;s wonderful.<p>A good packaging of Go with some helper shell commands is also quite nice, for other reasons.<p>&gt; I&#x27;ve never used a language with an ecosystem that so adamantly abided by one standard format. PEP8 comes somewhat close, but there are still fights over different linters etc...<p>You say this like it&#x27;s a good thing. I see only the downsides. I&#x27;m not much of a fan of Python&#x27;s contemptuous ecosystem either.<p>&gt; The vendor directory introduced in Go 1.6 (and usable in Go 1.5) has addressed the versioning issue with `go get`.<p><i>It most assuredly has not addressed this issue.</i> All it&#x27;s done is decreased the confusing filesystem zigguraut so that a single repo checkin doesn&#x27;t look patently ridiculous. Pretty important when GitHub is the primary code distribution mechanism.<p>But so long as the maintainers of Go pretend that everyone will always keep master up to date and never make breaking changes, Go projects are still at a disadvantage compared to every other civilized combiled build+deps tool.<p>I had high hopes for Go vendoring, but examinations in 1.5 really reinforced to me that the maintainers and designers of Go are interested in the (less compliant) real world issues everyone runs into, don&#x27;t care about shipping reusable code to a wide audience over a long period of time.<p>Languages with contempt for programmers as a central tenant often have problems like these.<p>&gt; Go projects do not decay if you&#x27;ve vendored your dependencies.<p>Hope you don&#x27;t have a library with bugs. I sure found many in the libraries I pulled and if I put down a server for a month to work on something else, then tried to grab a security update? It was never not a headache.<p>&gt; Am I crazy that I prefer having a race detector over a REPL?<p>I only refer to situations and inanimate objects as crazy. Anything else is disrespectful. You awknolwedge interactive development is necessary but don&#x27;t want first class support for it. I just don&#x27;t understand why you wouldn&#x27;t want to actually have something that could integrate into a real workflow. Sharability is something we already can get with trivial pastebin&#x2F;gist integration.