@robpike Perhaps even more than specific design decisions, I'm curious what parts of your pre-design goals turned out to be the "wrong" goals to set in the sense the eventual core audience of Go either within Google or publicly had different or differently-weighted needs than anticipated.

@robpike
I sincerely believe that not having sum types, from day 0, is the biggest sin of Go. Bigger than generics (although the two go well together). But in 2011 it's sad that it didn't include that.

Go also got some things right, like interfaces and having a strong consistent stdlib that relies on them when it makes sense. Formating, integrated tooling, in this it influences every language that has been created since

@robpike got right: a likable easy to use language with a lot of tooling that makes life easy and(as mentioned by others) a responsive community focused team driving the language. Also not pretending to be an everything language.

Needs improvement: error handling can at times be cumbersome (same code repeated many times is not "fun")

Good thing: I know that with the continued focus on refining the language that this will eventually have a solution

@robpike the only dramatic omission from my pov is compile-time unhandled error checking. i.e. i called a function with an error return value, but forgot to "err :=" in front of it.

maybe there's a good reason for it, idk, but it's the one thing that consistently trips me up

@robpike

Got right: gofmt and opinionated coding standards. In my experience this has been a profound boon when it comes to collaboration and code-sharing. No more bikeshedding over unimportant details.

@robpike maybe too many ways to declare a variable and the := shadowing problem. A lot of the other errors can be fixed

@robpike The stdlib log package being so lacking in functionality was bad for the ecosystem, because now we have 46 logging packages and little hope of unification. (I counted them at one point.)

@robpike Using nil both for empty interface variables and for null pointers, which are conceptually very different.