As someone who fits this description "never made it past 200-level CS courses" how do I make the leap from interpreted basically procedural programming to a compiled language like Go, or C, or whatever else - the mental model seems very very different to me, and I have trouble understanding what the program is doing when I try to just read along.
My advice is to ignore gatekeepers like OP and just start playing around with Go. The Go Playground is a great place to start, you can run it right in your browser. https://tour.golang.org/welcome/1
You can try Pascal. I switched from BASIC to Pascal 30 years ago then to C 5 years later. And even though C has been my everyday language for 2.5 decades for all my projects, Pascal was still the one that provided me the most natural mental model and that was the easiest to learn by practicing without lessons. I used to code as I thought without being interrupted thinking about stupid stuff like "I need a buffer to store this argument and to verify its length, ah shit I then need the ability to return an error if it's too large". In TP7 you even had "break" and "continue" statements that were missing from previous ones, that made it closer to C and a real joy to work with. The code was quite clean and extremely readable even with few comments.
The lower you get the more your model of computation must understand the host system; but be careful, even C statements often compile into surprisingly unexpected machine code.
If you want to explore this route I recommend picking up an embedded hobby project; Ie grab an Odroid Go and write some fun little arduino games in C++ using the Esp-Idf toolkit. It's got two cores, some IO, and a slowish LCD; and so you'll have to understand async programming and have a mental model of the device's memory to get any satisfaction.
But that still doesn't require much beyond most 200 level computing knowledge. :)
I think you are going in the opposite direction to which the OP seems to be lamenting.
First of all Go is not C; it’s much much easier to learn and write production grade services easily. There are a ton of free/ online resources to learn go; I’m self taught and have written production code in go for the past several years with no formal training. The godocs are great; YouTube has videos from gophercon and other conferences as well.
Second: OP is lamenting the lack of higher order programming paradigms like Generics; If you’re using an interpreted language it likely already has support for those things.
