I'm not a fan of the syntax either. My impression is that "close to the hardware" is not the selling point, but "close to Unix" is. If you view the language as

I'm not a fan of the syntax either. My impression is that "close to the hardware" is not the selling point, but "close to Unix" is. If you view the language as a safer super shell script, it becomes more obvious. Go was hyped in the beginning, but I get the impression that now it isn't. The most persistently hyped language here is Python. Fortunately, we see more Elixir, Ruby and Go posts lately.