[e12e]

I think it's more correct to say that Go is a better C (or perhaps: Pascal) than Python (or Ruby).

A lot of the rewrites I've seen done in Go, could probably have been done in C. The thing is, for lots of problems, Go is a better C than C. You can bolt on lots of safety features on top of C, and I think you could probably be very productive and safe in C if you forgot a lot of the dangerous features that C turns "on by default". It is for example possible to use Pascal strings in C.

I don't think the comparison with Vala (or Nimrod) is too far off -- but the Go team has lots of experience with language and system design -- and I think that really helps Go be a productive tool.