34 karma · joined October 29, 2013
Go was created for businesses, not developers. The holy grail of a corporate programming language is that all individual developer personality is restricted, such that _you cannot tell from reading code who wrote it_. This is all about long-term, large-scale maintainability for massive code bases at massive corporations.
Disclaimer: I work at Google, I do not represent Google, and this is just my opinion after spending time "on the inside".
Startup time has been massively improved. It used to take 5-10sec to start the REPL or run a test, now it's about 0.2sec.
I almost can't believe that all of the other (current) comments are complaining about the use of the λ character. Unicode is hardly a new concept, and it is certainly not "hostile" (hyperbole much?).
In fact, as modern languages like Julia become popular, I think we will see increased use of unicode characters in coding. Julia is very unicode friendly, which aids scientists and mathematicians when translating formulas to code. For example, it supports the "element of" operator ('∈') for testing if an item is in a set. These unicode characters actually _improve_ readability in many contexts, while being less convenient to type if you're only accustomed to ASCII.
It doesn't do arbitrary raster yet, but it has a cleaner syntax and prettier graph than the python/javascript ones.