It's sad that such basic stuff took this long. If we're lucky we might even see a `Map` function in our lifetimes.

Sounds like a win to me. I'd assume that many PL decisions come with with costs of either implementation or readability, and Go's conservative evolution takes that into account. Disclaimer: not a PL designer, just a codemonkey.

It's not a perfect language, and the process has not been without its pain points, but work like this makes the language more powerful and I feel like I get my money's worth when I use it.

Yes, I'm a Go fanboy but I'm not interested in language wars (e.g., yes Rust is more performant and correct but sometimes "good enough" is good enough).