> I don’t want to sound mean, but a friend of mine has suggested that he believes that “Rob Pike invented Go as a practical joke.”, and things like this really make me wonder if he has a point. Why would you design a language where the result of a function call cannot be stored or passed around?

Somebody show this person CMake, because if they've never used it, the resulting blog post will be incredible.

(CMake has functions... with arguments... and no return values. At all. Everything has to be saved to variables. Their workaround is that you can set and clear variables in the parent scope...)