[p0nce]

> Go's syntax and semantics seem ad-hoc, hard to remember, and inconsistent, but that's because Go was designed from uses cases and experience by prominent thought leaders such as Rob Pike and Ken Thompson, and Google. For example, sometimes you'll get Unicode code points, but sometimes you'll get bytes of UTF-8. The language was designed to give you the right one in the right case. UTF-8 is coupled with the language because it's the most useful choice. Another example is that pointers are automatically dereferenced, but not when you have pointers to pointers, because that's less useful.

How about Go's syntax and semantics seem ad-hoc, hard to remember, and inconsistent because _they are_ ad-hoc, hard to remember and inconsistent? What does your thought leader have to do with your genuine opinion?

[NateDad]

Any language seems inconsistent and has hard to remember syntax for people who are new to it. Unlike most of other languages, you can learn Go in a weekend and get beyond the newbie problems. There was a great article lately about Go's syntax - http://robnapier.net/go-is-a-shop-built-jig

The crux of the matter is that there are inelegant parts to the language because they are usefully inelegant, and when you're actually writing software, useful is better than elegant.