Uppercase exports are great once you get used to them. You can know whether an identifier is exported instantly without having to look up its declaration. Agre

Uppercase exports are great once you get used to them. You can know whether an identifier is exported instantly without having to look up its declaration. Agree that the multiple declaration/assignment syntaxes are unfortunate. Another example of this is that := can't be used for top-level declarations. Once you learn the rules you stop having to think about it, but if the rules were more consistent, they'd be easier to learn. The other big issue with Go's variables is shadowing. Again, one of those things that you pick up fairly quickly, but will bite newbies a few times. If-declarations are nice because they restrict the scope of a variable. I like knowing that I can see instantly that a particular variable is only used in three lines. Defer is a great way to clean up resources without the complexity of destructors and exceptions. Defer is also ubiquitous in code that needs to wrap accessor functions in a mutex. It's been adopted by a few other languages, which shows that it has merit. My only gripe with defer is that it only works on function scope; it'd be nice to have a defer scoped to a for loop. The other stuff is your personal preference, which I disagree with, but can't argue against :) I'll add another personal gripe of mine, though: typecasting is indistinguishable from a function call, e.g. Foo(bar) might be calling Foo on bar, or casting bar to type Foo. Those should really have different syntax.