I hadn’t thought of this before, but I think you are onto something critical about Go. In a different life, I worked deep in C# and the bowels of the CLR. New

I hadn’t thought of this before, but I think you are onto something critical about Go. In a different life, I worked deep in C# and the bowels of the CLR. New versions of C# were both exciting (woo, LINQ, anonymous things, lambdas, and a dozen others each release) and frustrating (ugh, visual studio doesn’t have specialized tools to handle this new stuff). I’ve been writing Go for 8 or 9 years now and I value the tool chain improvements far more than the language features. Race detection was a godsend. Indeed, even taking away capabilities (or just being more strict) has been valuable—like when multi-threaded access to slices became an error. In this release, I don’t much care about the new literal prefixes. But I’m excited about the improvement to defer performance and the improved range check panic messages. In a sense, other languages make it easier to to write new code with each release, but every iteration of Go makes my old code better too.