Is this what is so damning about Go? The constant reposting of this quote as some sort of attack on Go's validity and reputation reeks of nothing but classism.
"incapable" != "never capable", especially when talking about fresh college graduates.
Mr. Pike's quotation assumes that the Googlers should not be expected to be too intellectually capable. That's the damning part for me.
The fact that none of these highly accomplished individuals want anything FP-related in Go says far more than what typical Go-haters want to think it does.
Does it?
I'm not a Go hater but just because they were involved in making the things you listed doesn't mean they would do it again with Go. It just means they don't trust others with different languages.
I don't think what you said refutes people's perception of Go, which is its a fairly limited language that is good for keeping people on rails (like fresh grads). That might make sense for a large business hiring lots of people but maybe not for small companies.
Also there is a world of difference between FP features and the basic features people asked for in Go (like generics).
“The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt.”
-- Rob Pike
That's just not what he said or implied.
It's not a perfect language, but it's a pretty good language for building shit and shipping stuff.
And it starts getting to you, because a lot of problems just don't have nice solutions in the language because of its limitations. So you start accumulating kludges, which lowers the bar for quality in the entire code base.
There are PLENTY of techniques and abstractions that are VERY useful yet not expressible in a sane way in Go.
It's a nice enough language for beginners, but acting like it's the end all of programming just makes you look like a fool.