Have you spent much time in C? Go is directly descended from C, not Python. Its requirements are different. - If you are passing a number of related argument

Have you spent much time in C? Go is directly descended from C, not Python. Its requirements are different. - If you are passing a number of related arguments, often a struct is a better data structure than default or named parameters. - I am ambivalent about panic/recover, but have no problem with the rest. - I do tend to agree that "and" and "or" would be more readable, but it's such a minor issue. - Regarding your UTF-8 example, I imagine the Go authors believed most Go users would be spending more of their time dealing with bytes than characters. Go is not a language optimized for text manipulation, it is optimized for byte manipulation, like C. This is apparent in the lack of effort put toward optimizing the regular expression engine to date.