What you vaguely label as poor design decisions are actually trade-offs and they make sense to a plethora of highly educated engineers.

The people who made golang are not language designers, and/or did not research established options in other language as per their admittance.

Ken Thompson wrote B which is the direct predecessor of C. He was and is certainly a language designer and implementer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_(programming_language)

He falls under the "and/or did not research established options in other language as per their admittance" part of my previous statement. Not to mention that B nor C encompass lessons learned since their design.

>The people who made golang are not language designers,

I bet they've designed and executed on more programming languages than you have :)

That's not an argument.

Just like when C came around and everyone else was doing safe system programming in Algol dialects, PL/I, Fortran extensions, BLISS, Mesa.

I see a trend here.

Imagine what Ken Thompson could have accomplished if he hadn't made all those poor design decisions!

And yet hundreds of thousands of working programmers around the world are productively using Go while still continuing to ignore the supposedly superior solutions.

Mass adoption doesn't necessarily mean something is superior. For all the software that's written in Go, there's plenty more written in C++

Imagine how famous he would be if Bell Labs had been allowed to sell UNIX instead of giving its source code away with a symbolic price.

Hundreds of developers used Basic, Pascal, C, Modula-2, Assembly, Forth productively.

Maybe we should have kept using them, instead of coming up with programming languages that require a PhD. /s

Appeal to authority fallacy. People still use C, what's your point? There are superior options, but people are either (1) forced to use something inferior, or (2) don't know any better (especially if they drank the kool aid).

> people are either (1) forced to use something inferior, or (2) don't know any better

Here's another fallacy for you: false dilemma.

I agree with you and am nitpicking only for my own knowledge: isn’t it “False “Dichotomy”?