One of the motivations (linked in another comment) may reveal why: > We also wanted clean and idiomatic Go APIs If you want to use this as a scripting/plugin

One of the motivations (linked in another comment) may reveal why: > We also wanted clean and idiomatic Go APIs If you want to use this as a scripting/plugin language for Go programs (say, for those distributed computing programs you mentioned), it's pretty defensible to make it integrate with Go better by... building it in Go.