[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.