No people are exited about the plain and simple standard library, which is 2 years old, and thus currently relatively free of compromises (though more and more

No people are exited about the plain and simple standard library, which is 2 years old, and thus currently relatively free of compromises (though more and more are coming to light like you'd expect, like recently on the mailing list the complaint that logging can't be stubbed out, and this can't be changed due to backwards compatibility ... that's the arguments that will break the language). People were exited about the fresh compromise-less nature of the C++ standard library in the 80s, even in the 90s. About the fresh no-compromise approach of the java ones at the end of the 90s, and again right after java introduced generics. Go is no different. It's standard library is not that far from the cruft-level of the python standard library, and the next language change (which they absolutely need : generics) will bring it to the level of the java standard library, due to the need for backward compatibility with pre-generics go programs. Come on people, I realize at 16 I too thought that language X is forever (C++ in my case, on the plus side: it fared better than most. Some people, mostly the academics later switching to java, actually picked modula-2/oberon, which is/are a lot like Go. A lot went for visual basic, object pascal, and some for objective-C). But we're not 16 anymore ... When it comes to 15+ year old languages, I'd actually say C++ is the most cruft-free easily usable language. Depends, a lot, on what libraries you use though.