The first step to acknowledge not being great language designers is to actually be humble to learn from the work of others.
Not assert to all "we know better", and then repeatly having to backpedals on such assertions.
Based on what? Sure, the one guy managed to hack up the first version of C, but it took a complete rewrite and some major changes to become what we would actually recognize as C. Not exactly indicative of someone who knows what he is doing. And everything in Go was copied straight from Winterbottom's work.