There are a lot of tokens which are not strictly necessary, but which make a programmer's job easier. There's more to designing a language than making it use a

There are a lot of tokens which are not strictly necessary, but which make a programmer's job easier. There's more to designing a language than making it use as few tokens as possible. A programmer's job involves a lot of different things - merging two pieces of code, reading and editing someone else's code, viewing diffs of code, moving code from one place to another, searching large amounts of files for specific code. A lot of the choices in Go (and its standard formatting with gofmt) were made with all of these things in mind, not just the raw textual efficiency in mind.