I'm no language historian, but I did limit my timeframe to my personal experience of 36 years of development for a reason. There was necessarily incredible research in the 20 years prior to that, which made it into useable languages, of course this is no hard cutoff, just an arbitrary personal choice, and I am happy to stand corrected. My point was simply that at least in the languages that make up 2σ of all code running in production in the last 20-30 years very rarely do they include "language" features that did not appear as truly innovative sometime before that. It may be argued that simply including some prior research in a useable language is innovative, or that the incremental improvements are themselves innovation, but then we are bogged down in semantics. In summary every time anyone in recent years has claimed to be innovating in language design someone else counters it with prior art, and that Go never pretended to be innovative in this direction. Given the lineage, and experience of the Golang authors it is more likely, in general that they considered and rejected, rather than ignored.