I don't think your criticisms of Go are all wrong, but I do think they miss the point of Go. Go is designed to be a "best hits" sort of language. It doesn't t

I don't think your criticisms of Go are all wrong, but I do think they miss the point of Go. Go is designed to be a "best hits" sort of language. It doesn't try to do anything fancy or new (though several of its features are taken from lesser known languages) it simply tries to do what currently popular languages do, but much better. It will fail many CS theory benchmarks, but it does so in the aim of being productive now. To say Go doesn't do anything new is wrong however. The language specification doesn't include new material, sure, but the language tools are incredibly engineered. Go get just works (but don't use it for long term dependency management, that's not what it's designed for.) The documentation is stellar, and it's really easy to make good documentation. The compile times are lightning fast. Go fmt is by far my favorite feature; All Go code looks the same, and it even saves time trying to format code to look nice. As for your specific complains: :.:.: No, Go doesn't have generics, but for most cases that's ok. The saying goes when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. However Go does give you a screwdriver (interfaces), and it turns out a lot of things work well as screws. Generics aren't easy, they complicate the language (which goes against one of their language goals), and increase compile time or run time (which go against other goals.) They haven't said generics will never be in the language, just that they haven't found a solution they like and that it won't be in the language any time soon. :.:.: You can iterate in Go. Otherwise for loops are a tried and true method. :.:.: This complicates some code, but makes the language a lot simpler. Yes it's a trade off, and the language author's choices may differ from your preferences. :.:.: Yuck, nil pointers, I agree. However sometimes an ugly feature makes the whole language look a lot better. Nil usage aligns very well with the design of the rest of the language. Gross? Yes. The wrong design decision for Go? Definitely not. :.:.: Immutable values complicate the type system and require that those features occupy some brain power. They may be nice in other languages, they have no place in Go. :.:.: Go has unsafe operations.