When I squint at Go's syntax, underneath the C-like facade I see:

* higher order, first class functions * lists (squint at the slice a bit; also chans) * maps * flexible structs (curiously, you attach "methods" to them much as you attach functions to Haskell typeclasses).

If anything, driven by pure pragmatism for the sake of concurrency and distributed computing, Go actually does implement really awesome functional primitives. However, it's built to be familiar to C and doesn't talk about it much.

Very, very clever.