Python's approach has always been highly pragmatic. Go's is as well, but with somewhat different goals. The Go team's goal seems to involve putting together a clean-enough syntax with fast-enough for systems programming performance combined with powerful-enough high-level concurrency model. They don't want to win the gold in any one category. They're going for the decathalon!

In any case, language syntax should always take into account the expectation of programmer communities. If you push syntax too far, you lose too many people.

I wrote a lot of code of C/C++ and my implicit assumption is that C syntax is serviceable. Since I don't see C syntax (or JavaScript syntax or Java syntax) as a major problem and Go is an improvement over those, I don't see Go syntax as a major problem.

I agree with you that Python's syntax is cleaner but I would like to bring few novel syntax-related things that Go did that are not as commonly known and in some cases are improvements even over Python.

In general I don't like deep indentation and Go has few things to help keep indentation to a minimum.

1. defer statement

In Go you can say:

  f := os.Open("myfile.dat", ...)
  defer f.Close()

That guarantees that f.Close() will be called at function exit. In Python/Java/C# to get the same guarantee, you would have to use try/finally block, introducing additional indentation for the code using f.

2. Syntax for defining methods on interfaces

  func (p *MyClass) Method(int i) {
    return p.x + i
  }

The equivalent in Python would be:

class MyClass(): def Method(i): return this.x + i

Again, less indentation.

3. panic()/recover() way of handling fatal errors also doesn't introduce additional indentation level like try/catch blocks.

Doesn't the Go compiler flag as an error the fact that there's no "{" after the "if(blah())"? (On the same line, I mean.)