It was a comment on my personal experiences of interacting with the Go community, not the language and its limitations. My hope wasn't that Go implements my every pet peeve, my hope is that the community has gained some humility since I last dipped my toes in it.
Pike seems especially aggressive when interacting with people he disagrees with and this was for me indicative of the culture. It's been a few years though, so maybe by now I'm wrong!
Here's Pike on the topic of syntax highlighting:
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang-nuts/hJHCAaiL0so/E2mQ...
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/golang-nuts/hJHCAaiL0s...
That was the day I dropped the mailing list.
I disagree with Rob though, syntax highlighting is not juvenile, it's cargo cult programming.
That clearly implies anyone who uses syntax highlighting is juvenile. I'd say calling someone juvenile is meant to be denigrating.
FWIW, as much as I agree with Rob Pike on most things, I totally agree that he's abrasive and his way of phrasing things is often unhelpful (even though I think people also tend to read contempt into his brevity that isn't there). If it helps, I think he has realized that in the meantime and is largely staying out of public discussions for that reason.
edit: addendum: but also, in every thread about Go, there are some Haskell people showing up to talk about how the Go team is too stupid to understand the Haskell type system. This happens regardless of what the opening topic is, which in this case, is dependency management. No matter what the topic is, if it's a thread about Go, you will find Haskell programmers there, condescendingly talking about how Haskell's type system is so much better than Go's type system. It is very tiring.
Generics is a major tell, too, since the Go team's position on generics was always "generics are interesting but we don't know how to make them work well with Go's existing type system". See for example, this blog post from 2009: https://research.swtch.com/generic which references the FAQ answer to the generics problem here: https://golang.org/doc/faq#generics: "Generics are convenient but they come at a cost in complexity in the type system and run-time. We haven't yet found a design that gives value proportionate to the complexity, although we continue to think about it."
so I can see why people who have repeatedly answered the same question for years, only to have their answer misrepresented for years, to be annoyed when people who haven't read any prior discussion bring up a point that has been already talked about ad nauseam.