alt Hacker NewsI think you're giving far too much weight to that off the cuff quote from one of the creators of Go.
Really I think it's more useful to view it as a better C in the less is more tradition, compared to say C++ and Java, which at the time were pretty horrible. That's my understanding of its origin. It makes sense in that context; it doesn't have pretensions to be a super advanced state of the art language, but more of a workhorse, which as Pike pointed out here could be useful for onboarding junior programmers.
Certain things about it I think have proven really quite useful and I wish other languages would adopt them:
* It's easy to read precisely because the base language is so boring * Programs almost never break on upgrade - this is wonderful * Fewer dependencies, not more * Formatters for code
Lots of little things (struct tags for example) I'm not so keen on but I think it's pretty successful in meeting its rather modest goals.
> Really I think it's more useful to view it as a better C
But Go is nothing at all like C, and it's completely unsuitable for most of the situations where C is used. I'm having trouble even imagining what you're getting at with this comparison. The largest areas of overlap I can think of are "vaguely similar syntax style" and "equally bad and outdated type system". Pretty much everything else of substance is different. Go is GC'd, Go has a runtime, etc.