[burntsushi]

This was the original comment that I responded to:

> and having the interpreter get special status in breaking them, see generics

It's a whine that the interpreter gets "special status." It's implicit in the complaint that special status is somehow bad. It ignores any trade offs that go into the design decision.

Purity in this context means: the language gets no extra special power that users of the language can't tap into themselves.

> Honestly, sometimes it seems as if someone who wants to defend Go against a criticism immediately claims that the critic is just obsessed with purity.

And sometimes it seems as if someone criticizes Go just because they are obsessed with stuffing as many features as possible into a programming language. Shit happens.