That's fair. Go was designed from the start to be pragmatic rather than innovative. It is a refinement, rather than an enhancement, of its predecessors. And I definitely appreciate that when working with other people's code: it's unsurprising. Still, there is a gradient to "blub-ness". I think Go does a marvelous job of walking the line between discarding old conventions (like 'out' parameters) while remaining at the low level of abstraction conducive to writing fast code (e.g. unboxed types).