You seem to be analyzing this from a more economic approach, whereas I'm leaning to the historical. I think I can incorporate your position, but I feel as thoug

You seem to be analyzing this from a more economic approach, whereas I'm leaning to the historical. I think I can incorporate your position, but I feel as though you undermine the role of CSP. You see it as a "differentiator", whereas I see it as a central research interest of Rob Pike's that permeated all his previous languages and naturally had to make it into Go, as well. See this excerpt from the Alef reference manual [1]: chan(Mesg) keyboard, mouse; Mesg m; alt { case m = <-keyboard: /* Process keyboard event */ break; case m = <-mouse: /* Process mouse event */ break; } Now where the toolchain is concerned, again that was adapted from the Plan 9 compiler collection (which even OpenBSD at one point was considering but backed off due to licensing) which makes cross-compilation a surprising breeze. Carefully designed standard library? Plan 9's syscall interface... Composable APIs defined by one key abstraction? Plan 9 syscalls again, though there it was 9P. Speed was a motivator, but again - direct side effect of the "5 Principles of Programming" espoused by Rob Pike [2]. [1] http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/2nd_edition/papers/alef/ref http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/2nd_edition/papers/alef/ref [2] http://users.ece.utexas.edu/~adnan/pike.html http://users.ece.utexas.edu/~adnan/pike.html