[kunos]

You keep missing the point entirely. Go was created to solve a very specific Google scenario: offer a valid alternative to C++ and Java for whatever they do in Google. It's not a language created to make college students or language hippies happy..if you are looking for that look somewhere else. Go can be picked up by any dev with minimal experience in C/C++/Java in 1-2 weeks and that was one the main design targets. Another one was fast compile times, adding all those nice features you'd like would also make the language more complex to parse and compile. I think you can talk about how much you like Haskell all day long, but if you keep using Go as a comparison you simply show you have no clue of what you are talking about. It's literally apples to oranges.

[oisdk]

Maybe I am missing the point! It certainly wouldn't be the first time in an argument about programming languages.

I do understand, though, that the purpose of Go is not necessarily to push the boundaries of language design. I also understand that it's important the language is easy to pick up, compiles quickly, etc.

I think that some of Go's design decisions are bad, even with those stated goals in mind. Again, I don't want to overstate my experience or knowledge of language design (although I do know a little about Google's attitude towards Go, since that's where I spent my internship learning it), but some features (like "multiple return values" instead of tuples) seem to me to be just bad. Tuples are more familiar to a broader range of programmers, aren't a strange special case, are extremely useful, and have a straightforward implementation. Also, I don't want a bunch of fancy features added to Go: ideally several features would be removed, in favour of simpler, more straightforward ones.

[reificator]

I do agree, I would prefer tuples to multiple return in go.

Perhaps they find it easier to teach to users coming from languages with less or no type inference? Java and C++ programmers in my experience don't tend to be familiar with tuples, despite there being a tuple in the C++ stdlib. My purely uninformed guess is that it's because of how verbose declarations can get in Java, or in C++ without auto/decltype from C++11.