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Higher order functions are not easy to grasp for beginners, but once you do, they simplify reasoning about the code a lot.

Go is targeted at system programming, which is a domain in which you need pretty advanced developers. But the language feature seems to favor use by absolute programming beginners. It's a trade-off which seems somehow inverted.

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Go was designed to be easy to learn for inexperienced developers.

Is it actually intended for systems programming? Its main (and intended) use seems to be a faster and better at concurrency and parallelism alternative to Python, Ruby etc.

Rob Pike was after C++ programmers initially, turns out that naturally the language isn't appealing to that community.

> Although we expected C++ programmers to see Go as an alternative, instead most Go programmers come from languages like Python and Ruby. Very few come from C++.

https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponenti...

I messed around with Go early on but haven’t touched it since (I mostly do numerical work these days) but this tracks with what I expected from the language. It felt reactionary to the C++ monster. It felt like the early goal was to make the language as simple as possible, like C, and add quality of life improvements that don’t increase complexity, especially for parallelization with the go routines.

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