[LanceH]

I had the same opinion you did until I went to a Go meetup and everyone else was a C programmer. Coming from Ruby, Go wasn't expressive or forgiving. But everyone coming from C thought it was wonderful.

Personally, I feel you with respect to casting integer types. I'll code away with int's until something suddenly needs an int64 to use a package and I have to cast everything or refactor everything to int64. I once commented in a thread where people were asked, "In hindsight what feature would you like in Go?" I said that int should just be an alias for int64 (and float == float64), since these were the defaults in the stdlib. I was downvoted into oblivion in a thread on hypotheticals. I understand the historical machine dependent 32/64 difference, but since the stdlib made a choice, the default should line up nicely. That said, I mostly run into this in Project Euler problems, so not in my day to day work.