I remember learning about this gotcha around the time that Go was coming out. I was very disappointed that they were sticking to this behaviour around the same time that JavaScript was fixing it. As a new language they get less sympathy from me.
It does feel like Go is relearning lessons of other languages quite often. It's good that this and generics could be fixed later on, but it's unfortunate that they couldn't fix the null pointers (and going further always defaulting to some default value) and error handling.
