[couchand]

Well I guess I misread your comment, then. I had assumed your code sample for a type-unsafe implementation of Map, followed by the smiley, was a recognition of the major lacking on Go, not just of generics but of the ability to operate on collections. I read burke's comment as suggesting a privileged collections library that doesn't go all the way to user-space generics, but perhaps I misread that, too.

I would strongly disagree with the definition of "simple" that you seem to be using. I don't think it's important for a language designed for software professionals to have only features that are easy for high schoolers to understand. It's far more important that experienced developers be able to write a common idiom like map with as little cognitive overhead as possible, that's the meaning of simple that I find valuable in this context.