I agree with your assessment and share it myself. What gets me is the "I'll keep an open mind" type of comments I see attached to criticism of the language.
I don't mean that as a dig against you personally, but what I mean is that a lot of people who admit they don't like the language still feel obligated to add a similar phrase to their statements - which I think is entirely because this came out of Google and has a couple classic rockstars behind it. If it were introduced by an unknown research student or hobbyist, it'd have been dismissed and declared dead from the very start and that'd have been the end of it.
(I admit that I also was influenced by this. I saw the initial specs, some examples, and immediately thought, "this seems... pointless." But I dug in deeper because of the reputations involved. My opinion hasn't really changed, but I gave it a lot more attention than I would have otherwise because of these factors.)
The reason this bugs me is that there's a lot of interesting research out there in the languages world. It shows up on HN pretty frequently, but it never really spills beyond places like here because people have no trouble dismissing or ignoring new ideas immediately when they come from "strangers." I guess I don't have a big point here, just that it's unfortunate that this is likely going to result in a huge uptake of Go when other viable systems language alternatives have existed for, in some cases, decades but seem doomed to be ignored just because there wasn't a big name attached.
What gets me is the "I'll keep an open mind" type of comments
I think the 'open mind' is indeed the correct attitude here. If a very experienced programmer with stellar credentials comes along and says 'this is a good solution to the problems I've faced in my career', I'm inclined to listen very patiently even if my first impressions are negative.
This doesn't mean that you are wrong about the syntax, but perhaps there is something useful below the surface that's worth digging to discover. Maybe the right solution will be blend of a modern bracket-free syntax and the guts of something like Go.
For me, the syntax isn't really that important. Probably this is just due to my brain damage from coping with C.
I think that after they add some sort of generics, ie. parametric polymorphism, the language is semantically quite close to a modern ML-style language like OCaml, but with a syntax familiar to C hackers and a native support for concurrency.
I don't mean that as a dig against you personally, but what I mean is that a lot of people who admit they don't like the language still feel obligated to add a similar phrase to their statements - which I think is entirely because this came out of Google and has a couple classic rockstars behind it. If it were introduced by an unknown research student or hobbyist, it'd have been dismissed and declared dead from the very start and that'd have been the end of it.
(I admit that I also was influenced by this. I saw the initial specs, some examples, and immediately thought, "this seems... pointless." But I dug in deeper because of the reputations involved. My opinion hasn't really changed, but I gave it a lot more attention than I would have otherwise because of these factors.)
The reason this bugs me is that there's a lot of interesting research out there in the languages world. It shows up on HN pretty frequently, but it never really spills beyond places like here because people have no trouble dismissing or ignoring new ideas immediately when they come from "strangers." I guess I don't have a big point here, just that it's unfortunate that this is likely going to result in a huge uptake of Go when other viable systems language alternatives have existed for, in some cases, decades but seem doomed to be ignored just because there wasn't a big name attached.