From the programming I have done, I would say most of the 'repeated' functionality is things you would have done already, just in different ways. In fact, things like making the while loop a for loop is taking away things you don't really 'need'.

It is quite different when compared to python, but it is probably better compared to C, C++ or even Java. C is nearly 40 years old, a lot of the decisions that were made in its creation look silly now (terminating strings with '\0'? yeah, great choice). From what I can see of Go, they try to address many of these aging conventions.