You're right, it is dependent on your perspective. Go is intended to be unsurprising to developers who want to just be able to look at code and have a good idea

You're right, it is dependent on your perspective. Go is intended to be unsurprising to developers who want to just be able to look at code and have a good idea of what it does. Punctuation is very useful to get rid of ambiguity. Contrast this with a language like Ruby which tries very hard to make punctuation optional, and often ends up with ambiguous cases where you aren't 100% certain how the interpreter will parse some code and so you end up throwing in all the punctuation anyway.