Never met him, never really dealt with him, don't see why you feel you need to denigrate him.
I agree with the GP. Calling someone you've never met "a massive prick" with no evidence is rude and pretentious. Especially given how much he's contributed to computing.
He is a bit of a contrarian - but so what? All the interesting people are. There's a lot of daylight between someone being "a bit of a contrarian" and being "a massive prick". One does not imply the other.
You don't have to like Go. I sure don't. But have some respect for the people who have poured their lives and souls into making computing what it is today. Our industry wouldn't exist without them.
I attended my share of Unix User Group meetings. All of the names had people ride point for them at drink time, adoration is tedious.
Agreed, and I 100% believe that meeting him in person would most likely change my mind. I also 100% believe that he has every right to be an "arrogant prick" for all his contributions and achievements to the field. But that doesn't make him any less insufferable, unfortunately.
Also note that HN has guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Pike's developed a language designed to be easy "to understand and easy to adopt."
"It must be familiar, roughly C-like. Programmers working at Google are early in their careers and are most familiar with procedural languages, particularly from the C family. The need to get programmers productive quickly in a new language means that the language cannot be too radical." – Rob Pike
They are not researchers, they are engineers.
Do I think Pike could develop a language for researches filled with special unicode characters that do magic things? Of course.
But this practical approach to a language doesn't make him a giant prick. As someone who has played with "Fancy" languages you get tired of them (and the people using them) after a while.
Not using Unicode for Go syntax is a great thing.
Have a look at the APL language the author is mentioning, you will see you missed the point of his article.
The point of the author is not just about having more characters supported for identifiers or within strings (as the part of the golang specifications you are pointing to). He has more operators and related constructions in mind, which could benefit from more elaborate characters, e.g. the whole set of mathematical operations.
The issue I see however in his reasoning,is that precisely in the case of APL, dedicated keyboards had been built for it. The reason for limiting character set to ASCII, is there immediate accessibility on everybody's keyboard
Um, the Go reference explicitly states that "Source code is Unicode text encoded in UTF-8" [1], so I'm not sure what the hell this guy is talking about. The language itself maybe? Well contrary to the author of the article I'm really no fan of Rob Pike and I think he's a massive arrogant prick, but in this particular case he was absolutely right to be pragmatic for the language syntax and let people be stupid enough to use inaccessible characters in their source code. Which, come to think of it, actually flies in the face of the root principle of Go as stated by Pike himself, which is to shield dumb rookie Google developers from their supposed inexperience.
[1] https://golang.org/ref/spec#Source_code_representation