[microtonal]

especially when the designers of that new language shows no interest in looking at the last few decades of language research.

Since this is Hacker News, it's very likely that you are typing this on a machine running either an OS that is directly based on 60/70ies OS design (Linux) or a dead-end in 80ies microkernel research (Mach). Still, Unix powers a large number of devices and is popular among hackers. Unices may be less principled than their later peers, but people appreciate the trade-off between architectural principles (composability, everything is a file) and pragmatism in the form of 'worse is better'.

Go's developers are probably aware of most research in PL design. Go supports structural typing after all (OCaml and C++ via templates being the only other major languages to support it), and has CSP (yes, I know that's 78-85 research). But besides that, in line with its UNIX/C/Plan 9 heritage, Go is relentlessly pragmatic, choosing simplicity over abstraction power.

Evidently, Go has hit a sweet spot for many people, because Go already has big success stories (from Docker to Juju), which is impressive given it's short lifespan.

[Jweb_Guru]

I don't think Go's developers are aware of "most" research in PL design. But that's true of most languages, really, there are a billion papers to read. I think people are frustrated by what research they chose to ignore, though... anyway, saying that OCaml and C++ are the only major languages to support structural typing is a bit silly, since a lot of other languages that are probably more popular than OCaml have it (like F# and Scala). And Go's variant of structural typing is pretty limited.