I do think he sometimes went too far, but I think the attitude was admirable in as much as it was driven not so much by opposition to these features but in recognition of his own lack of understanding of how to make various features efficient. Which made the languages less viable in their "pure" states for day to day use, certainly, but also great starting points.

I wish more language designers would at least think about simplicity and implementation consequences, even if I too would prefer to work in a language where after thinking about that they still implement hard to optimise features.

My favourite language is Ruby, pretty much the anti-thesis of a Wirthian language, and certainly not Go, so I'm not saying all of the parts carried over to Go are necessarily things I agree with either.

At the same time, Ruby is full of things I wish had been better specified or left out, and often I get the feeling that if Matz had been forced to at least consider simplicity more when Ruby started out, it'd be a cleaner, better language for it. E.g. for the most part the Ruby grammar makes for a language that is nice to write, but it has so many dark, and horrible corners that does nothing to make Ruby pleasant that are simply there because nobody cared enough simplicity. Favourite example: "% x " may look like a syntax error, but it's the quoted string "x" - space is a valid quote character; if that isn't messed up, "%\nx\n" is also valid and produces the quoted string "x"... LF is also a valid quote character... Contrived Ruby hello world:

    x=%
    hello world
    
    puts x

(mind the whitespace - put a space after that "%" and it's suddenly a syntax error because the string suddenly ends at the space after "hello"; fun times)