[tptacek]

The space & time thing is a joke. Because we're nerds, we have trouble with clashes between literalism and humor. He is saying, the behavior of a function depending on its return value is like the past (the execution of the function) depending on the future (the storage of the result of the execution of the function).

He's a very smart guy (and the author of one of my all-time favorite Mac apps, Hexfiend) and I'm pretty sure he understands what is actually happening.

I'm not sure that spending a lot of time in Go is going to get him over the "Damnable Use Requirement". It is really, really annoying.