"bad" ideas? Really? Are you so sure? Are your ideas really any better? What language have you made that has seen more success than Go? Clearly if they did such a bad job it would be easy for you to fix it all up and tell everyone about it.

Go is basically a reinvention of a 30-year-old wheel. Why would someone who dislikes it for that reason want to reinvent the wheel themselves? There are already many better languages out there.

In any case, designing and even implementing a PL better than Go is not a particularly hard thing to do. Making it popular in this day and age, on the other hand, generally requires a large corporation backing you.

How come a reinvention of a 30 year old wheel is more successful and popular than pretty much every language that attempted to evolve the wheel during that time?

"It's because people who like Go are stupid and companies need stupid people to write stupid code" may have made you feel smug and secure during the last 15 years, but what about the next 15? Or the 15 after that? Are you still going to be complaining about the stupid 70 year old wheel made by that dumb guy Pike that you hate so much?

If you really want to make an argument from popularity, C, C++, C#, and Java are all more popular than Go.

Yes, and all are equally offensive to the average Go hater, all of them have NULL, and all of them have terrible error handling. It's not "argument from popularity", it's "argument from success". Some things succeed. Other things don't. It would be worthwhile for you to investigate why things succeed despite all the hangups you have with their flaws instead of lamenting them because the things you like aren't succeeding.

It's pretty clear at this point that your "average Go hater" is largely a strawman. There are many reasons to dislike Go, and different people have various combinations of pet peeves that don't neatly translate to this mental image of, "they must also hate C# and C++ and Java then!".

Argument from success disregards the simple fact that, in this day and age, no language succeeds without massive corporate backing - and, conversely, a large corporation can throw money at a language to prop it up in a situation where it would struggle to get market share otherwise. So, no, the fact that Go is as popular as it is, is not particularly interesting. If it actually overtook Java - its most direct spiritual competitor - then yeah, I'd consider that a more serious data point.

I'm kind of glad for that. There are certainly some ideas I wish Go adopted--I could do without zero types and I wish there were enum types. But I'm glad Go eschews monads and higher kinded types and functional syntax and inheritance and exceptions and classes. I'm also glad Go introduced ecosystem-wide style checking, effortless static compilation by default, ~zero config build tooling, test/profiling/etc tooling built into the standard toolchain, low latency garbage collection, etc etc etc. I'm glad it does not require dedicated package or documentation publishing steps.

> There are already many better languages out there.

Not really. Even if you're just looking for a reasonably productive mainstream language with effortless native, static compilation Go is likely the only language that fits the bill.