But those languages are universally accepted as bad (well aside from Ruby, I don't know much about it because I already know Python and never felt I needed a di

But those languages are universally accepted as bad (well aside from Ruby, I don't know much about it because I already know Python and never felt I needed a different syntax for pretty much the same thing (arguably less used)) If someone started developing a language today and came up with C or PHP they would be criticized for many of the pitfalls of the mentioned languages and there would be a lot of improvements that could make those languages objectively better. But they are what they are because their design decisions were made under totally different environment than today and the advantage of using them is that you get to leverage everything built since then (well this argument is much stronger for C than PHP because PHP has alternatives that could be viewed as strictly better). But Go is a new language. It's trying to sell itself as a better solution to existing problems so the level of criticism is going to be (justifiably) much higher - it doesn't just need to meet minimum usability bar - it needs to be better than existing defaults, and significantly so to justify the cost of switching - both in terms of learning and porting.