- On the "damnable use requirement", I see his point. If anything, it means that Go will be better used with IDEs than text editors that'll do this for you automatically;
The lack of partial/incremental/parallel compilation make this a lot less attractive. A lot of IDE technology (e.g., "intellisense," syntax errors, missing imports) are built off of rapid recompilation.
In fact, doing it any other way seems pretty stupid. If your compiler doesn't offer that information then the IDE has to re-implement those codepaths just to provide that information.