I am perpetually baffled by this particular defence of Go. Go has a number of real strengths, but it also has several howling, inexcusable, flaws. How can you possibly say that that this is the work of people who are expert in language design?
Not a language.
> Plan 9
Not a language.
> B (the predecessor of C)
A version of BCPL, stripped down to fit on the hardware they had. Considerably less sophisticated than Algol, which had been designed years before.
> Inferno (a successor of Plan 9)
Not a language.
> UTF-8
Not a language.
> They definitely are experts in language design.
What?
It's hard to admit, but all of the languages we have are of amateurish quality.
Does the "wrong" way always tragically win in the marketplace of ideas? Maybe our (sub)culture has a screwed up idea of what "right" is?
(Such things were asked in the Smalltalk community for years.)
There was a period of time when this was true, which helped to kill Smalltalk mindshare. Then, there was a period of time when there were many economically priced Smalltalk environments, and a even a good FOSS one. Now, we have a couple of good FOSS environments.
Firefox can't render a damned favicon with the resources that Smalltalk used.
Everything you're doing now either was or would have been insanely expensive in 1983.
Emacs used to be derided as being an acronym for "eight megabytes and constantly swapping".
Sure, a big deal on a Sun3 with 4 megs of RAM.
It wasn't the price of RAM that made Smalltalk expensive.
You may not like the choices they made. Fine. But stop assuming that it was from ignorance or incompetence. It wasn't.