I was puzzled by this decision of theirs though. They are so hell bent on keeping the language as simple as possible with a minimum of keywords, but apparently

I was puzzled by this decision of theirs though. They are so hell bent on keeping the language as simple as possible with a minimum of keywords, but apparently can't be arsed to just write var a = 5 like normal people, but prefer to invent a whole new operator for it. Operators are often demanding even more of a reason to exist than keywords. Then you also get the operator inconcistency between "assigning to a new variable" and "assigning to an existing variable" and is it so important to tell the two apart from within an operator, of all things? When writing Go, I have been way more inconvenienced by its error handling mechanics than having to tell that I want a new variable using a few more characters.