It really is just C with a GC and slightly better support for generic programming, which is why I like it quite a lot as a default language for writing basic pr

It really is just C with a GC and slightly better support for generic programming, which is why I like it quite a lot as a default language for writing basic programs. I like Go, but I didn't like the post for somewhat similar reasons. I felt it pats itself on the back for several language design wheel reinventions that are basically lesser versions of counterparts in other languages. For example, interfaces are touted as some brilliant solution for polymorphism as though Haskell wasn't already doing the "sets of methods" (but with type arguments from the start) idea via type classes as early as 1988...sure interfaces are a bit different since they are implicitly implemented, but the basic idea is the same. The whole Erlang being a good prior in the concurrency space is another example. In general it left a bad taste in my mouth since it sort of felt like the language was designed in ignorance of the vast field of ideas already present in programming language theory. It really comes off as though the team thought that Java, C, and C++ were the only languages that existed before Go. Wadler's (eventual) involvement suggests otherwise (but then again, maybe they only knew about his work in relation to Java), and I realize there are constraints to giving live talks that force one to trim things down, but I really dislike this tendency to think in a vacuum, celebrate your own (re)discoveries as brilliance, and then to present it all without hardly a mention of the large body of research that went before you, and that you should have consulted during your creative process. Given the access we have to research today, there's little excuse for it. I doubt that Rob Pike actually falls into this camp or lacks this knowledge, but the talk (in essay form) really makes the team of language designers seem like it was a team of people that knew little about language design and happened to stumble onto analogues of good ideas that already existed in more mature form. I will say, though, that I like that the writing of a spec is touted as one of their best decisions, as I really wish more novel languages would bother to define specs these days.