However, the direction the language took ended up being quite predictable and somewhat of a bore. The problem with Go is that it doesn't seem to fit any particular niche. Some other design decisions were questionable (no exception handling, for one).
I kind of like Go, but I haven't used it for years. There's no real reason to NOT write something in C (or, rarely, C++) or Java, or if I need some serious scaling, Erlang (or just use either something like libevent for C or Kilim for Java).
Go is very D-like. D, like Go, can't really find its niche. If Go or D were more idiomatic, perhaps they would be adopted in early programming classes (high schools and colleges -- like Python, for example), but even though goroutines, channels, and fast compilation are interesting concepts, they aren't really enough to detract from writing in the many other languages that do just about the same thing (and are a lot more popular).