How much programming language syntax is really intuitive, as compared to what you've grown familiar with over time?

Once you use the Go(/Jinja/Perl) syntax once or twice, then putting a minus sign to remove whitespace will be easily understood.

I am interested in an alternative that you find more elegant.

> I am interested in an alternative that you find more elegant.

Why not make it a filter/pipeline (I haven't used template/text in ages, does it support this?), like in Django {{ thing|trimleft }}.

{{ foo -}} does not strip white space from the output of foo. It eats up the following white space.

So "{{ foo -}} bar" renders the same as "{{ foo }}bar".