[joshmarlow]

I didn't down-vote, but what jumps out to me is the assumption that you'll generally be pulling data from a database. Yeah, that's almost certainly true in a web-application, but it's not going to be nearly as universal in a systems-programming niche which is where Go appears to be excelling (as perceived by someone outside of the Go community).

So ease of implementing sorting in your core language without making assumptions about the operating environment of code written in that language sounds like a reasonable demand.