I write a lot of Go, and I spend most of my time doing analysis (usually in R, occasionally in python). I'm interested to understand whether there was a specific motivating example that drove the creation of this new go-like language.

This is Hacker News, so there definitely doesn't need to be anything beyond "I could, so I did." But if this actually solves some problem better than existing solutions, it would be cool to read about. Edit: Without a motivating example, it's hard to imagine that people will want to pickup a Go-like (but not exactly Go) language for data science.